Rachel Becker

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Professional/Academic Experience

Dr. Rachel Becker’s work centers on issues of genre, virtuosity, gender, popularity, and the development of woodwind instruments. 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 the materiality of musical instruments. 

Her research includes performance studies, peripheries of the canon, and continued bias in “acceptable music” within the study of Western art music. Her publications and presentations explore new approaches to narrative in instrumental music, as well as social and cultural influences on virtuosic woodwind music, including reception history and the (positive and negative) emotional responses genres and compositions have evoked contemporaneously and today.

Her first book, Valuing Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera Fantasias for Woodwind Instruments, was published by Routledge in March 2024. Additional publications include a forthcoming chapter, “Unconventionally Conventional: Instrumental Music in the Opera Theatre” in Outside the Theatre: Music in Unconventional Venues of Nineteenth-Century Europe (Brepols, 2026); the article “Re-approaching a taxonomy of the opera fantasia: a clarified genre, a clarified context”, Lietuvos muzikologija, no. 24 (2023); the conference proceedings article “The Gendered Physical Narrative of Wind Virtuosity: Pasculli, the Opera Fantasia, and the Female Oboe” in Nova Contemporary Music Journal (2023), and reviews in Notes, The Double Reed, and Early Music.

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

Dr. Becker is active in musicological societies and has presented with the American Musicological Society, the Royal Musical Association, and the Biennial International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music, as well as at many other international and national conferences. She was president of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the American Musicological Society from 2023-2024.

Dr. Becker also remains active as an oboist. She has performed with the Boise Baroque Orchestra, Boise Philharmonic, and Opera Idaho, as well as with the Portland Opera, 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 is a Howarth Artist and performs on a Howarth XM oboe and a Howarth XL English horn.