After almost 30 years of working for the franchise and for creating one of the most memorable music in all of animated TV’s history, Alf Clausen was fired by the Fox Network earlier this week. The Emmy-winning composer has been orchestrating the music for The Simpsons for 27 years to date. It’s been a working relationship for so long, but Fox seems to be trying a new direction. This might be a necessary shake up for the famous show, but we wonder why Clausen couldn’t have been a part of that change. We’ll always be fans of his music and talent, so we wanted to share five things about Alf Clausen that you probably didn’t know about.
1. Alf didn’t start working for The Simpsons until he was almost 50 years old.
He began composing for the show in 1990 after having had a most successful career in orchestrating music for many famous movies including The Naked Gun, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Moonlighting. He’s also worked on countless of other TV shows before focusing his efforts on The Simpsons.
2. Alf has a Twitter account.
His handle is @TheAlfClausen, and even though there’s only 91 tweets on there, it might be a great way for fans to express their support for the talented composer, whose music will forever be engrained in our 90s and 2000s brains. He also has his own website that lists his discography and his biography.
3. Alf has done over 560 episodes of The Simpsons.
It’s actually exactly 568. That’s quite an impressive number in addition to the 27 years that he’s composed for the show. Within those 568 episodes, Alf has written over a thousand of original songs specifically for the song. It’s another impressive number but probably one that the network execs didn’t care so much about.
4. Alf Clausen’s work was not easy.
In one interview he conducted about a Halloween episode in 1998, Alf admitted that it took him 6 days in a row to write music for the episode–music for a 35-piece orchestra. That’s six days of working from 9 in the morning until 11 at night. That’s just the writing process. He then has to practice all the songs with the 35-piece orchestra, perform all the songs perfectly on cue, and then move on to the next episode. He did this for 568 episodes, for each type of instrument in the 35-piece orchestra.
5. Alf loves R&B. He started off his career as a French horn player and was part of many jazz bands.
His favorites were the early R&B artists such as Chubby Checker, Fats Domino, and Little Richard. He was also a big Elvis fan. Aside from composing and conducting, he still loves to play music even though much of his later life became dedicated to The Simpsons. Now that he’s been let go, we don’t expect this Emmy-winning composer to sit around and mope. We expect Alf to continue creating amazing music regardless of the outlet. We hope he does it soon, and we truly can’t wait.
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