Sara Salloum: Lutenist

My PhD thesis was awarded the Royal Musical Association Practice Research Prize last month! Read more about it here: RMA 2025 Practice Research Prize awarded to Sara Salloum – Royal Musical Association The RMA Practice Research Prize for 2025 is awarded to Sara Salloum (University of Newcastle) for her thesis ‘Female lute accomplishment and performance practices in early seventeenth-century England’ (University of Durham). The panel commended this rich and insightful work which drew on detailed performance-based practice research and recognised its potential for wider impact through further dissemination in the future. The research findings were original and engaging – of particular interest is the experiential work on how the clothes worn by female lute players shaped movement and influenced performance choices.

Thank you to the Lit & Phil Historic Library in Newcastle-upon-Tyne for having me as a guest performer for one of your prestigious lunchtime concerts. It was fantastic to perform music from early modern English female-owned lute books to a highly enthusiastic and engaged audience on 1st Aug 2025.

It was a complete pleasure and privilege to be a part of Singing with Nightingales ' Shakespeare Special on the 18th April . I can still hardly believe I really did duet with a nightingale! That's one performance I won't ever forget. Thank you also to Sam Lee and Debs Newbold for your kindness and artistry.  See my Artist Profile here . 

New podcast episode for the Early Music @ Newcastle Festival is now live! Watch here (below), or on YouTube . Thank you so much Jacob Heringman for being part of this!

Hello and welcome to my website! I am a professional performing musician of Renaissance plucked string instruments, and a music scholar interested in female musicians principally from the early modern period. My AHRC-funded doctoral work (completed Oct 2024) investigated the lute performance practices of gentry women in early seventeenth-century England. It did so through the analysis of material culture from the period (visual art, clothing, literature), manuscripts of lute tablature, which I read fluently, and, at the core of my project, a practice-based methodology through which I utilised and developed my own performance practice. This culminated in several innovative and varied creative performance outputs which ranged from videos of myself performing the lute in accurately reconstructed period clothing and an album of lute music sourced from the female-owned early seventeenth-century manuscript known as the ‘Margaret Board lute book’, to an original electroacoustic ‘sound-work’...

Publicity material and a link to my YouTube channel Sara & the Lute can be found here: https://sarasalloum-lutenist.blogspot.com/p/promotional-images.html   https://www.youtube.com/@sara_and_the_lute

See my new photos page for freshly uploaded images of my lute historical reenactment work at Bramhall Hall and Skipton Castle...