By Sunil Shah,
Assistant Editor of The Groove, Berklee's weekly student publication

	Alf Clausen
	Photo by Bob Kramer

Sunil Shah: Who are some people, maybe people in the industry that you've worked with or other composers, that have influenced you?

Alf Clausen: I have quite a few depending on what side of my background you look at. One of my early influences was Henry Mancini. He had a really big influence on me from a film scoring standpoint. I just loved all of the colors that he used and the way he could put instruments together in unusual ways. I've always loved Jerry Goldsmith's stuff, John Williams' stuff. Bernard Herrmann of course, you know, was just a master.

How about songwriters?

Well, all of the masters. Cole Porter very much so. Jerome Kern. Those are probably two of my favorites. Stephen Sondheim, naturally. The Gershwins had a lot of influence.

With "The Simpsons," often you'll have string writing in the vein of, like you mentioned, Bernard Herrmann, followed by a song that's stylistically straight out of a musical. Is that perhaps one of the most rewarding parts of your job with "The Simpsons," the diversity that you have?

I would say so, because it really helps keep you from getting bored doing the same thing week after week, which can happen a lot on a television series. Many times, television series are very stylistically pigeonholed, and the producers get comfortable with a style and want to stick to that. After a while, the composer really does kind of have to fight going half braindead trying to get through the week. But on "The Simpsons," that's never the case because there are always so many interesting asides, different places that we go, different influences that the producers want to draw on–when they want me to parody different styles. I often think I've covered them all in ten years, but new ones keep surfacing, and I think that they constantly will. So it really does keep the juices flowing.

I wonder if you could take us through what a typical work week for "The Simpsons" entails?

Well, a typical work week when I'm in the scoring process involves doing a music spotting session on Friday afternoon with the Executive Producer or another one of the Producers, my music editor, and maybe two or three other producers at the same time. We go through each episode and decide collaboratively which spots should contain music, where the music should start, where it should stop in each scene, and the general stylistic content of each piece of music.

When we finish the spotting session, which usually lasts about two hours, my music editor takes all of his handwritten notes back to his studio and prepares a set of what are called spotting notes. It's a grand summary of everything we talked about in the spotting session, listing each individual music cue with a little paragraph summation of what the scene is about and what the music cue is about stylistically, then lists start times/end times with SMPTE time code and the length of each cue in minutes and seconds.

I use this set of spotting notes as my jumping off place to figure out what kind of an orchestra I need for the scoring session for this episode. Once he's done that and I get my orchestra call out, he then prepares a set of timing notes for me, which break down each music cue into seconds and hundedths of seconds, listing all of the lines of dialog, all of the important action points, each cut within a scene, and general word descriptions of what goes on within a scene. The timing notes can range in length from a few lines if it's a short cue up to sometimes two, three, and four pages worth of information if it's a long cue. He then emails me all of those pages of information in Adobe pdf format.

I end up with a fairly lengthy book of timing notes for each episode. We have an average of 30 cues per episode; sometimes we've had as many as 52 cues. If some of these timing notes are several pages long, you can see that the book gets to be a pretty good size by the time we're done. I proceed to compose my cues from these timing notes, and all of the timings that I use within the cues have to obviously match to seconds and hundredths of seconds. I use a computer time processing program called Auricle. I do all of the clicks and streamers (the timing references) in my studio on my own computer, and then I take my computer into the recording session and use it to generate the clicks and the streamers for the musicians.

I usually get started on either Sunday or Monday composing the cues, depending how heavy the week is. I put in very long days, from 9 o'clock in the morning until usually 11 o'clock at night for four or five days in a row, composing all of the cues for the week, and I have a 35 piece orchestra, so there's no cheating in this job. You have to write every note. And then, on Friday afternoon, we have the spotting session for the next week's episode, and then Friday night I record all of the cues that I've written in the previous week with this 35 piece orchestra. Then, it starts all over again.

When you begin to compose, and you have some ideas, do you generally aim for larger cues first? Does it vary, or do you work chronologically?

Well, I try to work chronologically, and for the most part I do that. I try to get a kind of overall arc of the musical thrust of the episode, so to speak, from beginning to end, but when we get under the time pressures of, for instance what I just came off of doing four episodes in four weeks for February sweeps–when you start the succeeding weeks you tend to be half braindead from the pressure of the week before.

It's hard to get the creative juices flowing again in each week that comes up, so I've kind of settled into a routine of starting the beginning of the week with the no-brainer cues, meaning the cues that I can write strictly from a craft standpoint. For instance, little cues of drum rolls and cymbal crashes, and solo pipe organ cues, solo guitar cues, and bagpipe cues or whatever there happen to be, where they don't take a lot of compositional focus from an orchestral standpoint, and I can write those with my brain kind of half-dead until all of a sudden the adrenaline starts to kick in for the next week . Little by little, I get the creative juices back, and I get back into doing the full-blown orchestral stuff.

Do you ever find yourself really pressured with maybe a bit of writer's block? How would you approach a situation like that? Do you even have time to put it aside and deal with it the next day?

Sometimes that happens. Not very often, but sometimes just because of the fatigue factor of the intense schedule on a week-to-week basis. Some of the cues become much more difficult than others, and I use the same trick at that particular point, too: some cues that I can write from a craft standpoint where I know my creative juices don't have to be flowing in another space, where I can fashion cues that I know are going to be perfect for the situation, but they're all based on craft. So, I can spend my time chipping away at the grand total of cues that I have to do every week because the clock continues to tick, and I have to always be producing something, you know? In a schedule that is this intense, you don't have any breathing space to take a half-day off and go walk on the beach to clear your head. There just isn't the time for that, so I always have to be forging ahead, and that's where the craft comes in.

I want to ask you about your orchestrations and sketching them out for other people…I think you do some of the orchestrations yourself?

I do a good portion of it myself. On an average week, I probably do 65%-75% myself.

For the rest of the time, when you are working with orchestrators, how detailed do you get as far as your sketches, or what instructions do you give?

My sketches are really quite detailed. I use nine-line sketch paper and fill it up pretty well. There are a couple of schools of sketching in the industry. One is the completely detailed sketches like John Williams does and Bruce Broughton does, and the others are really sketchy. They can involve a melody and some chord symbols and a few word descriptions saying "orchestrated in the style of…" Mine tend to lean on the John Williams and the Bruce Broughton side, where my sketches are very complete. There are many times when we're really really under the gun when I can sketch on a nine-line sketch paper and actually send it to the copyist, they can copy it directly from the sketch paper, and it'll be totally accurate.

Is orchestration something that happens almost immediately? Do you have to think much about what orchestration you're going after?

Well, at this particular point, after having done this for a long time, having orchestrated for a long time–and I have a long history of orchestrational training–I don't think a lot about it anymore because it comes wrapped up in the composition package. If I figure out what a cue is going to be, I find that I'm actually composing for the orchestra directly, whatever the combination happens to be. I don't think of a melody on piano and then think of what will fit it. I automatically know when I put a melody down on a piece of paper who's going to play it and what it's going to sound like. I paid my dues as an orchestrator in my early days, and I worked under a lot of magnificent composers in Los Angeles and learned a great deal about orchestrational processes and working in film and all of that. I've kind of moved away from the orchestrational part of it. I'm more interested in the compositional aspect.

One of the films that you did recently was a comedy, Half Baked. How did that experience compare to working with "The Simpsons?" Was it possibly easier because you're used to such a rigorous timeline?

Well, that's a really interesting question. In many ways it was easier, but one of the things that I found kind of frustrating about the process was the fact that most motion pictures move so much more slowly than television does in the production process. I'm used to looking at something on Friday and recording the music for it the next Friday and getting instant gratification, so to speak, in seeing and hearing it on the air a week from that Sunday and also turning around and doing another one in a fairly short amount of time. There is something nice to be said about that form of instant gratification from the standpoint of being able to get your work realized and watch it very quickly come to fruition.

The motion picture process is quite different, and it often just lumbers along. I joked with some of the production people about how I should have gone to Maui for two weeks before taking that job because I really needed to mellow out big time and get into the motion picture timeline groove. It's nice in a way to have that kind of breathing space, but unfortunately what seems to happen is that everyone in the production company seems to have that breathing space, and they never make up their minds about what they want to do. And then post-production takes a big hit on the other end, so when push comes to shove, the composer has to crank out the material in a very short turnaround time anyway. It was a very interesting experience.

Is that something you have with "The Simpsons"–you don't see a lot of changes in post-production? Once you spot an episode it's already locked, so you have a week and then you're recording whereas in motion pictures they will often make changes.

Oh, motion pictures will make changes, it seems like they'll make changes up until the day before it appears on the screen. I'm exaggerating a little bit, but it seems like the changes are going on constantly, and changes are being made even while the picture is dubbing. So, it really puts a composer at a disadvantage to try to do the absolute best work for the project. When I score a Simpson's episode, for the most part, the episode is locked. Occasionally we'll have a few animatics, which are pencil renderings in motion of what the scene is going to be because the colored versions haven't come back from Korea yet.

Occasionally there will be retakes, which are restructuring of certain scenes that have to come back and be put in when the animation didn't quite get the story point correct, and the producers have wanted to change things a little bit so they'll ask for retakes. So those come back late, but for the most part everything is locked. There aren't a lot of changes that get made to the music. I've been very fortunate from that standpoint. Most of what I write stays in.

If there were changes I would imagine that would create quite a bit of urgency at the recording session or preparing for them beforehand.

Yeah, it does, but fortunately as I say, there are very very few changes that have to be made on "The Simpsons." I make very few modifications on the scoring stage, whereas in motion pictures that's a whole different story. The changes just keep coming in and coming in. The timing notes in our bible-we start keeping track of 1M1 R1, meaning revision one, and R2, R3, R4, R5, with dates on them and sometimes even hours stamped on them just to make sure that we're all on the same page and working from the same set of notes.

What do you think have been some of the most intense situations recording for "The Simpsons?"

I think probably the sessions that we have where there are cues that number in the fifties. Some of the Halloween episodes have had 52 cues. That's a lot of pressure in a day. We usually do a double session for those, 2-to-3-hour sessions, to give us enough breathing space to get everything done correctly. But, as I say, after having been on it for ten years now I'm pretty accustomed to the pace, and it doesn't seem to rattle me too much.

I want to talk a little bit about your educational background or career path so far…how you've gotten where you are today and maybe where you see yourself headed.

Well, I'm a firm believer in education. I received a Bachelor's Degree in Music Theory from North Dakota State University before I came to Berklee. I worked on my Master's Degree in Music Theory at the University of Wisconsin for a little while, and then came out to the Berklee College and went through the entire Berklee system-I went year round–and did the whole thing in two and a half years. I taught part time while I was there and then stayed and taught full time for a year after I graduated.

Then I moved to Los Angeles and started to work as an apprentice under a number of different composers doing all sorts of different kinds of jobs–starting in writing arrangements for Las Vegas style nightclub acts, worked in jingles for a while, ghosting charts for jingle writers. Eventually I ended up in variety television and worked as an arranger in variety television for a while and gradually worked my way up to becoming music director.

My first big network job was music director for the Donny and Marie Show on ABC, and then I also became music director of the Mary Tyler Moore variety series on CBS. When those jobs ended, variety shows kind of went away, and I was looking for something else a little bit more interesting to do at that particular time and wanted to get involved in the film business.

I had to start at the bottom of the film business. I started working my way up through the ranks, orchestrating for various composers. I had some really great composers to work with: Lalo Schifrin, Bill Goldstein, Jim DiPasquale, Lee Holdridge, Ira Newborn. I did a lot of features with these guys, and I really learned the ropes of what it was like to be a film composer/orchestrator. Little by little, I just kind of rose through that system and with Lee Holdridge's help, ended up as the composer on a new ABC series called Moonlighting, which was really what put my composing career on the map. So my background is really pretty broad. I've paid a lot of dues and done a lot of things.

"The Simpsons" has celebrated, I think, ten seasons...

I'm in my tenth year. The show's in its eleventh.

I read a comment from one of the producers that there are no immediate plans for an end…

Right.

But whenever the series does come to an end, do you anticipate moving into some features or maybe just taking that in stride?

I anticipate taking a vacation. (Laughter) But, I certainly would like to move into features. I would love to do some really good quality features, but you know, I figure that's going to happen when it's going to happen and we just take it one day at a time. In the meantime, "The Simpsons" is still funny after all these years. Each week brings new surprises and new challenges.

This article originally appeared in the March 6, 2000 edition of The Groove.

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