Alf Clausen, the composer who made “The Simpsons” even funnier with his music for 27 years, died early Thursday after a decade-long battle with Progressive Supernuclear Palsy (PSP). He was 84.
Clausen won two Emmys and another 21 nominations for the long-running animated Fox series. He began scoring the antics of Bart, Lisa and company in 1990, during its second season, and is believed to be the most-nominated composer in Emmy history with a total of 30 nominations overall.
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He also won five Annie Awards, also for “Simpsons” music. His long tenure with Matt Groening’s irreverent creation made him one of the most respected creators of animation music in TV history. His nearly 600 original scores for the series are also believed to be a record for the most written for a single TV series in America.
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“Alf was the ‘Man of a Thousand Music Cues’ — actually probably more than 10,000 — during his decades on ‘The Simpsons,'” creator Matt Groening told Variety. “He was tireless, inspired, and always up for the musical challenges we threw at him.”
Clausen conducted a 35-piece orchestra every week, something producers insisted upon from the beginning. His unexpected firing in August 2017, a cost-saving move by Fox and “Simpsons” producer Gracie Films, resulted in a firestorm of protests from fans around the world.
Producers decided to recognize Clausen’s indelible contribution by crediting him as “composer emeritus” in subsequent seasons.
Clausen was as adept at songwriting as score composition. Both his Emmy wins were for songs on “The Simpsons,” and they formed the basis for many of the tracks on the series’ three popular compilation soundtracks (“Songs in the Key of Springfield,” “Go Simpsonic with The Simpsons” and “Testify”).
“This is a dream job for a composer,” Clausen told Variety in 1998, on the occasion of the series’ 200th episode. “Matt Groening said to me very early on, ‘We’re not a cartoon. We’re a drama where the characters are drawn. I want you to score it like a drama.’ I score the emotions of the characters as opposed to specific action hits on the screen.”
Clausen once explained his musical process on the series: “The basic premise of this whole series is the joke, and the jokes come rapid-fire. An old bandleader friend of mine once told me, ‘You can’t vaudeville vaudeville,’ meaning the joke is much funnier if you play the real situation as opposed to playing the music funny. You pull the audience into the reality of the situation. If you try to ‘Mickey Mouse’ it, or play the comedy, you’re already tipping your hand. So you try to play the reality of the situation as much as you can.”
In a profile of Clausen published in 1996 by his alma mater Berklee College of Music, “Simpsons” creator Groening called the composer “one of the unacknowledged treasures of the show. Alf understands the show and produces a voluminous amount of music in all different styles. He is our secret weapon.”
One of Clausen’s greatest strengths was that ability to write in many different styles, from symphonic to jazzy to contemporary, sometimes riffing on famous film scores or other pop-cultural references, and do it in as little as a few seconds, just enough to make a comedic point.
“The Simpsons” capped a long career in music for television that dated back to the 1970s. He was musical director for variety shows including “Donny & Marie” and Mary Tyler Moore’s short-lived “Mary” and contributed arrangements to specials headlined by Nell Carter, John Schneider, Tony Orlando, Goldie Hawn and others.
Clausen orchestrated for other composers including Lalo Schifrin (“Princess Daisy”) and Craig Safan (“The Last Starfighter”) but it was composer Lee Holdridge who propelled his career as a dramatic composer. After orchestrating such Holdridge films as “The Beastmaster,” “Splash” and others, Holdridge launched the Bruce Willis-Cybill Shepherd dramedy “Moonlighting” and then turned it over to Clausen.
Six of Clausen’s pre-“Simpsons” Emmy nominations were for “Moonlighting,” including two landmark episodes: the black-and-white “The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice” and the “Taming of the Shrew” sendup “Atomic Shakespeare.”
He scored more than 60 hours of “Moonlighting,” and the series’ infamous last-minute post-production schedule often meant writing an entire score over a weekend in order to make ABC’s Tuesday-night airdate.
Among his other series as composer were “Wizards and Warriors,” “Fame,” “Lime Street,” “Christine Cromwell,” “The Critic” and “Bette.” He scored nearly 100 episodes of the late 1980s puppet sitcom “Alf” (and when asked about the title, he would often quip, “no relation”).
Clausen was born March 28, 1941, in Minneapolis, but grew up in Jamestown, N.D. He earned degrees from North Dakota State University, the University of Wisconsin and Boston’s Berklee College of Music. He later studied film scoring with Earle Hagen and was a two-year member of Lehman Engel’s BMI Musical Theater Workshop.
Berklee honored him with an honorary doctorate of music in 1996; North Dakota State bestowed another honorary doctorate on him in 1999. ASCAP gave him its Golden Note Award in 2011; said ASCAP president Paul Williams on that occasion: “Alf Clausen’s decades of scores are as endlessly inventive as the imaginations of the shows’ writers and animators. It takes a lot of serious work and thought to compose, arrange and conduct such wonderfully happy music.”
Clausen also released an album of his own big-band compositions, “Swing Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” in 2005.
Survivors include his wife Sally, former wife Judy, sister Faye, three children, two stepchildren, 11 grandchildren, one niece and one nephew. A private memorial will be held, with a public celebration of life to follow at a later date.