Andre Pleuss, Sound Designer

Andre Pleuss is a sound designer and composer who has worked with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Interview Excerpts

BEGINNINGS IN SOUND DESIGN

ANDRE PLEUSS: I went to the University of Chicago, in Chicago, Illinois—the great city of Chicago. And I studied music theory and composition there and—as a minor concentration—and I had a major concentration in European history and at the same—while—while an undergraduate there I started working for the student theater in various capacities.

And in my final year there I ended up as a sort of marriage of, between my European major and my music theory—my music theory composition minor, writing a rock opera with a fellow—another student who is a very good friend of mine to this day. We work together all the time. A guy by the name of Ben Sussman.

And we did this adaptation of Dante’s Inferno, as a rock opera. It was terrible but we had a great time. Worked on it for a year and it was my—it served as my research on—on—on the Divine Comedy and was, you know, it sort of fulfilled my European concentration and then, you know, my work adapting it for the stage and writing the music for it sort of did the work of my music theory and composition minor. So.

That—in the aftermath of that—and that—that was my final year there—it made me really want to do more with music and theater. Not to say that we wanted to write more musicals but we were just interested in the role that music plays in plays.

I didn’t know at the time that there was a category of theatrical design called sound design. But I knew I wanted to write music for the theater. And over time we realized that, oh, wow, you know, while we’re interested in music, directors and playwrights were interested in also ambient sound effects, like literal sound effects.

The first time somebody asked us to work with sound—I remember it was rain in a play—it took us a while to kind of get our heads around the idea that they were literally asking for literal rain. [Slight laugh.] And we were thinking, you know, what’s the musical metaphor for rain, and you know, and—and working from a composing—composer’s standpoint.

THE SPECTRUM OF MUSIC

ANDRE PLEUSS: Over time, you know, we realized that—you know, if you think of it as a spectrum on—on one end of the spectrum music in the most traditional sense, you know—harmony, polyphony, multiple parts, counter points. You know, they are pieces of music that we are writing for plays, that are for trend—that are dances in a Shakespeare play, songs in a Shakespeare play, songs in any play. Transitional music to cover—to cover big scene shifts, you know, in scene breaks, and they are pieces of music, you know, and they range from anything from a small chamber ensemble to a rock and roll band to a jazz trio, whatever, depending on whatever the—the needs of the show are.

And then on the other end of the spectrum it’s just straight up sound design and we’re doing a play that’s sort of maybe say it’s rooted in naturalism and there is a lot of environmental sound that’s part of the design, you know, and that—that’s us curating, finding in sound effects libraries or going out and recording our own sound effects, editing them, and integrating them into the piece.