Dr. Rachel Becker is Assistant Professor of Music History at the University of Northern Colorado. She previously taught at the University of Cambridge in the UK. Rachel received her PhD from the University of Cambridge, and her MM in Oboe Performance from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. She also has an MPhil from the University of Oxford and completed her BA in Music with Highest Distinction at the University of Virginia.

Rachel’s work centers on issues of genre, virtuosity, gender, popularity, and the development of woodwind instruments, engaging with performance studies, peripheries of the canon, and continued bias in “acceptable music” within the study of Western art music. Her current projects focus on current societal resonances of historical musical criticism – including in the gendering of musical instruments and of genres in contemporary Western society – and on networks of female performers in the nineteenth century.

Her first book, Valuing Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera Fantasias for Woodwind Instruments, was published by Routledge in March 2024. She also has published in the International Double Reed Society journal as well as in other journals.

Rachel is active as a performing oboist. She has recently performed with the Colorado Bach Ensemble, Boise Philharmonic, and Opera Idaho, as well as with local orchestras such as the Greeley Philharmonic and the Boulder Symphony. She has played with the King’s College and St John’s College, Cambridge choirs, and with the renowned Philharmonia Orchestra as a part of the King’s College 500 celebrations. She has worked with conductors including Sir Roger Norrington, Peter Donohoe, Paul Daniel, and Howard Shelley and has performed in Cadogan Hall and King’s Place, London. She also performed at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where she premiered Tim Watts’ opera Kepler’s Trial. Rachel performs on a Howarth XM oboe and a Howarth English horn.