Alf Clausen Dies: ‘The Simpsons’ & ‘Moonlighting’ Composer Who Won Two Emmys Was 84
Alf Clausen, who won a pair of Emmys as composer for The Simpsons from 1990-2017 and also composed music for Moonlighting, ALF, The Critics and many other TV shows and films, died Thursday of Parkinson’s disease. He was 84 and had been diagnosed in 2020.
His daughter Kaarin Clausen announced the news on social media. “He left a huge mark on this world and has touched the lives of millions, and I’m so proud to call him ‘Dad,’” she wrote in part. “Rest easy, Maestro. I will miss you every day.”
Clausen wrote music for nearly 600 episodes of Fox’s landmark toon The Simpsons, starting early in its second season, though Danny Elfman penned its iconic theme song. He won back-to-back Emmys in 1997 and 1998 and earned 30 career nominations, including a half-dozen for the 1980s ABC Moonlighting starring Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd. He also won five Annie Awards and seven ASCAP Film & TV Music Awards for The Simpsons. In 2011, Clausen was awarded ASCAP’s Golden Note Award, which is presented to songwriters, composers, and artists who have achieved extraordinary career milestones.
Born on March 28, 1941, in Minneapolis and raised in North Dakota, Clausen moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in TV composing. He did orchestrations for a 1975 episode of Norman Lear’s All in the Family spinoff Maude and later worked on Donny & Marie before becoming music director for fellow variety series The Mary Tyler Moore Hour in 1979.
Into the 1980s, Clausen would go on to do orchestrations for such feature films as Airplane II: The Sequel, Mr. Mom, Splash, The Last Starfighter, Weird Science, Wise Guys, The Naked Gun and its first sequel Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and the Dave Chappelle starrer Half Baked.
Meanwhile, his career as a TV composer was taking off. Clausen worked on series including Wizards and Warriors, Fame and Partners in Crime before landing a full-time gig on Moonlighting, working on all five of its seasons. He later worked on the Jon Lovitz-led toon series The Critics, the Bette Midler sitcom Bette and on all of episodes of NBC’s sitcom ALF.
But of course, that’s all secondary to Clausen’s crown jewel.
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The Simpsons used a 35-piece orchestra, which Clausen conducted, enabling the wide variety of musical styles required by the show. The score was recorded weekly for each episode. He began composing for The Simpsons in 1990, early in its second season, and remained with the juggernaut series though Season 28 in 2017, when he was fired from the show.
“We tremendously value Alf Clausen’s contributions to The Simpsons, and he will continue to have an ongoing role in the show,” the show’s producers said in a statement to Deadline at the time. “We remain committed to the finest in music for the Simpsons, absolutely including orchestral. This is the part where we would make a joke, but neither Alf’s work nor the music of The Simpsons is treated as anything but seriously by us.”
Clausen didn’t find it funny. Nearly two years after his dismissal, he sued Disney and Fox for age discrimination. claiming the originally stated reason for his exit — “taking the music in a different direction” — was “false.” Instead, he alleged, his “unlawful termination was due to perceived disability and age.”
The legal battle lasted for nearly 2½ years, until Clausen’s attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the case, which had gone to appeal a year after it was filed. “It was pretty evident that we weren’t going to prevail, and defense counsel reached out to suggest that we should resolve to not risk being forced to pay case and attorney fees,” Clausen’s primary lawyer Ebby Bakhtiar said in a statement then.
MORE TO COME…
