Iowa native Rachel Niketopoulos has been playing the horn since she was 12 years old. She studied horn performance and received her undergraduate degree from the University of Iowa in Iowa City, and her masters degree at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. She is grateful for her liberal arts education because it sparked her curiosity of the wider world. She met her duet partner and husband Christopher Caudill at the New World Symphony in Miami Beach. She was a member of the Virginia Symphony, before moving to Raleigh, NC to play with the North Carolina Symphony. After graduation from the Alexander Alliance training program, she became a certified instructor of the Alexander Technique, and has been teaching private and group lessons ever since. She has been a certified yoga instructor since 2010, and has pursued further study in mindfulness by completing the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program at Duke University, and by attending many meditation retreats. She teaches Alexander Technique at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, and horn at UNC Chapel Hill and Duke.

Rachel and Christopher have fallen in love with exploring early music, and performing on hunting horns, baroque horns, and classical horns – no valves allowed! They have performed together with NC Baroque, Raleigh Camerata, Indianapolis Baroque, Atlanta Baroque, Apollo’s Fire, Bach Akademie Charlotte and the Duke University Chapel Cantata Series on their Baroque and Classical horns.