Alf Clausen, the Emmy-winning composer whose music provided essential accompaniment for the animated antics of The Simpsons for 27 years, has died.
His daughter Kaarin Clausen told The Associated Press that Alf Clausen died Thursday (May 29) at his home in Los Angeles after struggling with Parkinson’s disease for about a decade. He was 84.
Clausen, who also scored TV series including Moonlighting and Alf (“no relation,” he used to joke) was nominated for 30 Emmy Awards, 21 of them for The Simpsons, winning twice.
Al Jean, an early Simpsons writer who was one of the key creative figures on the show in the 1990s, said in a post on X Friday that “Clausen was an incredibly talented man who did so much for The Simpsons.”
While Danny Elfman wrote the show’s theme song, Clausen joined the Fox animated series created by Matt Groening in 1990 and provided essentially all of its music until 2017, composing nearly 600 scores and conducting the 35-piece orchestra that played it in the studio.
His colleagues said his music was a key component of the show’s comedy, but Clausen believed the best way to back up the gags of Homer, Marge Bart and Lisa was by making the music as straight as possible.
“This is a dream job for a composer,” Clausen told Variety, which first reported his death, in 1998. “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.”
Groening, in a 1996 interview, called him “one of the unacknowledged treasures of the show.”
Clausen was born in Minneapolis and raised in Jamestown, North Dakota. He graduated from the Berklee College of Music in 1966, and moved to Los Angeles seeking a career in music.
In the 1970s he was a musical director on several TV variety shows including Donny & Marie.
Clausen worked as an orchestrator for composer Lee Holdridge in his scores for 1980s films including Splash and The Beastmaster.
It was Holdridge who first got the composing job on Moonlighting, the late-’80s ABC rom-com detective series starring Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd, but he handed the gig off to Clausen, who would get six Emmy nominations for his music on it.
Clausen won his Emmys for The Simpsons in 1997 and 1998 and also won five Annie Awards, which honor work in animation in film and television.
He was fired from The Simpsons in a cost-cutting move in 2017, to the outrage of his collaborators and fans. He sued over his dismissal.
Clausen is survived by his wife, Sally; children Kaarin, Scott and Kyle; stepchildren Josh and Emily, and 11 grandchildren.
