Alf Clausen, Acclaimed Simpsons Composer, Dies at 84

Alf Clausen, who spent almost three a long time as composer for The Simpsons—scoring seasons 2 by way of 28—died Thursday (Might 29) at his Los Angeles residence. Clausen’s daughter, Kaarin Clausen, informed The Hollywood Reporter that her father had been recognized with progressive supranuclear palsy eight years in the past. He was 84.

Clausen was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and was raised in Jamestown, North Dakota. Whereas learning at North Dakota State College, Clausen took a correspondence course in big-band songwriting courtesy of Boston’s Berklee Faculty of Music. He ultimately transferred to the college, turning into its first French horn participant.

Clausen started his songwriting profession in Los Angeles, the place he freelanced as a composer, ghostwriter, and arranger. He ultimately discovered work on tv exhibits just like the Donny & Marie present and The Mary Tyler Moore Hour. Within the Nineteen Eighties, Clausen served because the composer for the detective sequence Moonlighting, for which he acquired six Emmy nominations. He later composed music, appropriately, for the tv present ALF. Clausen additionally composed the music for movies corresponding to Bizarre Science, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and The Bare Gun.

Clausen joined The Simpsons in 1990, when the present was in its second season. As composer, his position concerned creating songs, cues, and reinterpreting Danny Elfman’s theme alongside a 35-piece reside orchestra. Clausen scored over 560 episodes of the present and was nominated for 21 Emmy Awards (out of a profession complete of 30) for his work. He gained twice, for 1997’s “We Put the Spring in Springfield” and 1998’s “You’re Checkin’ In (A Musical Tribute To The Betty Ford Middle).” Clausen’s emblems on the present usually concerned massive band, jazz, or broadway numbers and whereas his compositions could possibly be silly, they had been usually extremely moving. His songs for the present had been collected on soundtrack albums like 1997’s Songs within the Key of Springfield and 1999’s Go Simpsonic With The Simpsons.

Talking to the Television Academy in 2015 as a part of their The Interviews sequence, Clausen described his preliminary reticence at taking the job that might come to outline his profession: “I stated, ‘I simply received off of 4 years of Moonlighting, and I actually need to be a drama composer. I’m extra serious about doing longform function movies.’” It was Simpsons creator Matt Groening who ultimately received the composer on board by telling him “we glance on our present as being not a cartoon—we glance upon it as a drama the place the characters are drawn.” In a 1996 profile revealed in Berklee As we speak, Groening known as Clausen “one of many unacknowledged treasures of the present.”