Alf Clausen, who spent almost three many years as composer for The Simpsons—scoring seasons 2 by 28—died Thursday (Could 29) at his Los Angeles residence. Clausen’s daughter, Kaarin Clausen, advised The Hollywood Reporter that her father had been identified 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 finding out at North Dakota State College, Clausen took a correspondence course in big-band songwriting courtesy of Boston’s Berklee School of Music. He finally transferred to the varsity, changing 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 finally discovered work on tv exhibits just like the Donny & Marie present and The Mary Tyler Moore Hour. Within the Eighties, Clausen served because the composer for the detective collection Moonlighting, for which he obtained 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 function concerned creating songs, cues, and reinterpreting Danny Elfman’s theme alongside a 35-piece stay orchestra. Clausen scored over 560 episodes of the present and was nominated for 21 Emmy Awards (out of a profession whole 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 logos on the present typically concerned huge band, jazz, or broadway numbers and whereas his compositions may very well be foolish, they have been typically extraordinarily transferring. His songs for the present have been collected on soundtrack albums like 1997’s Songs within the Key of Springfield and 1999’s Go Simpsonic With The Simpsons.
Chatting with the Tv Academy in 2015 as a part of their The Interviews collection, Clausen described his preliminary reticence at taking the job that may come to outline his profession: “I mentioned, ‘I simply bought off of 4 years of Moonlighting, and I actually need to be a drama composer. I’m extra involved in doing longform function movies.’” It was Simpsons creator Matt Groening who finally bought 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 In the present day, Groening known as Clausen “one of many unacknowledged treasures of the present.”
