Andrea Klassen

Andrea Kate Klassen specializes in medieval plainchant and early music, with an emphasis on medieval notations and manuscript contexts. She holds a Bachelor of Music in Music History from the University of Manitoba, and a Master of Arts from Dalhousie University in Musicology. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is finishing her dissertation on chant transmission as an ecology of mind, focusing on the multi-regional diffusion of neo-Gregorian chant.

Throughout her research, Andrea is fascinated by historical notations and manuscript studies. Andrea was the recipient of the Hewitt-Oberdoerffer in 2023 for her paper, “The Context and Performance of Anomalous Neumes in the Musical Manuscripts of Hildegard of
Bingen,” in which she traces unusual notational symbols through Hildegard of Bingen’s musical manuscripts. She has also conducted notational studies on the St Gall Cantatorium (presented at ICMS Kalamazoo 2021) and Vol 39, an eleventh-century troper from Volterra (presented at AMS-SW Chapter Meeting 2022; ICMS Kalamazoo 2023). Her work on Vol 39 is the topic of a forthcoming article.

Andrea has assisted on numerous digital humanities projects, including the Hildegard of Bingen Music Research Guide and Cantus Ultimus, and is an avid contributor to the Cantus Database. In 2022, Andrea held a Harry Ransom Center fellowship, for which she indexed HRC 21, a Dominican processional, for the Cantus Database, which she presented as part of the Skills and Resources for Early Musics Study Group meeting at AMS in New Orleans in 2022. Currently, Andrea is working with a team of researchers assembled by Luisa Nardini to research and index a set of manuscripts associated with San Giovanni a Carbonara, which they presented on at MedRen Granada 2024, and the Soundscapes of Naples conference in 2023.

In addition to plainchant and early music, Andrea is interested in both posthumanism and queer studies. In Fall 2024, she is offering a class on “Musicking and the Posthuman” which will explore the intersection of music studies and posthumanist theory. Currently, Andrea is working on a research project on the American indie-pop band, Muna, and their relationship with queer joy. She will present this research at the upcoming annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in October.