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March 26, 2018 — In a few days, it’ll be Alf Clausen’s birthday. He was born in 1941, grew up in Jamestown, and you may have heard his work — in fact we’re pretty sure you have — if you’ve ever seen an episode of “Moonlighting,” starring Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepard, or the television alien spoof, “Alf” (no relation to our Alf Clausen), or “The Simpsons” after its twelfth episode. Clausen wrote the music for them all.

While going to school in Jamestown, Clausen showed a major inclination toward music; he played piano and French horn and sang in his school choir. But after high school, he decided to be a mechanical engineer and enrolled at NDSU.

Luckily, a trip to New York brought him to his musical senses. He went to visit his cousin, a piano player in Manhattan, and decided music was really where his heart was. He went back to Fargo and switched his major to music theory. From there he moved on to Berklee School of Music in Boston where, upon graduating, he was hired as an instructor.

After a year of teaching, Clausen went west where he did some ghost-composing for Las Vegas night-club acts, then on to L.A. where he found work as a bass player, a copyist, a teacher and an arranger. As an orchestrator, he’s been credited on movies like “Wise Guys,” “Weird Science,” “Ferris Beuller’s Day Off,” “Naked Gun,” “Splash” and “Mr. Mom.”

Orchestrators are the people who take a composer’s music ideas and write them out, choosing appropriate instruments for the different parts as they go. It wasn’t a far leap for Clausen to make the move to composing, and his break came with the “Donny and Marie Show.” Then it was on to “Moonlighting,” then “Alf,” and then ... unemployment.

Seven months later, things weren’t looking so great. Then a friend called to say, “I was having dinner with my nephew last night, and he’s a producer on a television show, and they’re looking to change composers, and I suggested you, and my nephew said, ‘Oh yeah, Alf. Why didn’t I think of him? Do you have his phone number?’”

Ironically, Clausen had never even seen “The Simpsons” when he scored his first episode, “The Treehouse of Horror.” The corporate suits liked what Clausen came up with, and he’s been with them ever since. By 1997, when he released a Simpson’s CD titled “Songs in the Key of Springfield,” he had credits in 28 films, 24 TV series, 24 movies of the week and had been nominated for 14 Emmy Awards.

Simpsons creator Matt Groening calls Clausen their “secret weapon.” With the unpredictable directions the show takes, a composer has to be able to keep up. Alf has the background and experience to score whatever is necessary, whether it be realistic drama, over-the-top comedy, down ‘n dirty jazz, show tunes or remakes of popular television themes.

Clausen says the key to writing for comedy is, “Don’t try to be funny,” which he learned from a bandleader friend. “He told me that you can’t vaudeville vaudeville,” Clausen says.  “That has always been my take... to make sure that I always play...the real emotion of the character. And because...I have played it for real, the audience is pulled in and made to feel as if the emotions that these characters are feeling are very real and very deep. And all of a sudden the punch line hits you between the eyes, and you think: Oh, my God. I can’t believe they got me again.”