Los Angeles – Alf Clausen, Emmy’s winning composer whose music provided essential accompaniment for animated mischief “The Simpsons” For 27 years, he has died.
His daughter Kaarin Clausen told Associated Press that Alf Clausen died Thursday at his home in Los Angeles after fighting with Parkinson’s disease for about a decade. He was 84 years old.
Clausen, who also scored television series, including “Moonlighting” and “Alf” (“Unrelated”, used to joke) was nominated for 30 Emmy awards, 21 of them for “The Simpsons”, winning twice.
Al Jean, an early writer of “Simpsons” Who was one of the key creative figures in the program in the 1990s, said in a publication about X Friday that “Clausen was an incredibly talented man who did a lot for the Simpsons.”
While Danny Elfman wrote the main song of the program, Clausen joined the Fox animated series created by Matt Groening in 1990 and essentially provided all his music until 2017, composing almost 600 scores and performing the 35 -piece orchestra that played it in the studio.
His colleagues said that his music was a key component of the program comedy, but Clausen believed that the best way to support Homer’s jokes, Marge Bart and Lisa was by making music as much as possible.
“This is a dreamed work for a composer,” Clausen told Variety, who first reported his death, in 1998. “Matt Groening told me very early:” We are not a cartoon. We are a drama in which the characters are drawn. I want them to write it down as a drama. “I get the emotions of the characters instead of specific action successes on the screen.”
Groening, in a 1996 interview, called “one of the unrecognized treasures of the program.”
Clausen was born in Minneapolis and grew up in Jamestown, North Dakota. He graduated from Berklee College of Music in 1966, and moved to Los Angeles in search of a music race.
In the 1970s he was a musical director in several television variety programs that include “Donny AND Marie “.
Clausen worked as a orchestrator for the composer Lee Holdridge in his scores for the films of the 1980s, including “Splash” and “The Beastmaster”.
It was Holdridge who got the composition work in “Moonlighting”, the ABC ABC detective series of the 80s starring Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd, but gave Clausen the concert to Clausen, who would get six Emmy nominations for his music in him.
Clausen won his Emmy for “The Simpsons” in 1997 and 1998 and also won five Annie Awards, which honor the work in film and television animation.
He was fired from “The Simpsons” in a cost reduction movement in 2017, to the outrage of his collaborators and fans. He sued for his dismissal.
Clausen is survived by his wife Sally, the children Kaarin, Scott and Kyle, the stepsary Josh and Emily, and 11 grandchildren.
