Alf Clausen, Composer for The Simpsons, Dies at 84
Image courtesy of The Simpsons™ and ©1990 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.
Alf Clausen ’66 ’96H, the Emmy-winning composer best known for his work on The Simpsons, passed away on May 29 at age 84.
Clausen was born on March 28, 1941, and grew up in Jamestown, North Dakota. He attended North Dakota State University and the University of Wisconsin in addition to Berklee.
Class of '66. Clausen is fourth from the left.
After graduating from Berklee's first baccalaureate class, Clausen worked a variety of music industry gigs in Los Angeles—arranger, teacher, performer, music copyist, jingle writer—before landing a long-term job on the Donny & Marie show. That led to work on The Mary Tyler Moore Hour, Moonlighting, and ALF.
Then came The Simpsons, the longest-running scripted primetime television series of all time, for which Clausen wrote an average of 35 music cues for every episode from Season 2 through Season 28. He was nominated for a total of 30 Emmy Awards, winning two.
In a 1996 profile for Berklee, Simpsons creator Matt Groening said Clausen was “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.”
“He was tireless, inspired, and always up for the musical challenges we threw at him,” Groening told Variety.
Clausen was awarded an honorary doctorate from Berklee in 1996, as well as one from North Dakota State in 1999. He also released an album of big band compositions titled Swing Can Really Hang You Up the Most.
"Alf Clausen was a once-in-a-generation musical genius and his passing is an enormous loss for the Berklee and composing communities," says Sean McMahon, chair of the Screen Scoring Department. "In my view, The Simpsons would not have experienced its incredible success without the wizardry of Alf's music. Any genre, any style, Alf could pull off with great mastery and precision. He was also as generous as he was talented, and sponsored an annual scholarship in his name for a deserving Screen Scoring student. His impact is impossible to overstate and we will miss him dearly."
