Tag Archives: The Simpsons

Alf Clausen Fired from “The Simpsons”

Composer Alf Clausen (L) speaks with host Jon Burlingame at “SCORE! A Concert Celebrating Music Composed for Television” presented by the Television Academy at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Wednesday, May 21, 2014, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Vince Bucci/Invision for the Television AcademyAP Images)

Strange as it may sound, this story may have had the widest global repercussions of any story I’ve ever written for Variety. I learned that composer Alf Clausen, after scoring more than 550 episodes and winning two Emmys for his music, had been fired from The Simpsons after 27 years on the job. It was shocking, but after talking with Alf about it, we decided to go public on Aug. 30. I filed the story at 11:50 a.m., Variety posted it at 12:15, and within hours virtually every outlet in the world was repeating the news. It even made the front page of the BBC. Fox declined comment at the time, and was clearly unprepared for the worldwide outrage that would follow. Clausen is not only highly respected within the musical community, he earned nearly two dozen Emmy nominations for his work on that show alone — and is believed to hold the record for scoring the most episodes of a prime-time network series in television history.

“The Simpsons” at the Hollywood Bowl

This was among the few film- and TV-music nights at the Bowl this summer I was not involved with, even peripherally. So we got to go and just enjoy. Here’s a recap with a little more musical detail than you will find in most reviews of the weekend celebration.

Alf Clausen and “The Simpsons”

The Simpsons has set so many records that it’s becoming hard to keep track. One of those, a little-known one — maybe because I’m the only writer who has ever actually noticed — is that composer Alf Clausen’s 500 scores for the series constitutes a record for total original scores written by a single composer for any prime-time series in the history of American television. I’ve visited Alf’s recording sessions on a number of occasions. Here is a Variety story about him scoring the 500th episode; there’s one from 1998, when I witnessed the recording of the 200th episode; and here’s one from 2007, about scoring the 400th episode. The latter two offer a lot of detail about how the process works and why Alf has been so successful at it all these years.