The Music of Alf Clausen

By Thomas Johnson

Contributing Writer

In putting together a memorable TV show or motion picture, the creators have to find a great producer, a strong director and a good cast. One of the key ingredients that the general public usually looks over is the composer of the music for the project. There are a handful of composers in the last few decades in movies and television that have been as busy working on so many diverse projects as composer Alf Clausen. He has composed the music for more than 30 television shows and motion pictures in the last 30 years. He has received two Emmy awards for his work on “The Simpsons” and a total of 28 Emmy nominations. He has contributed music to classic films like: “Ferris Beuller’s Day Off,” “Splash,” “Half Baked,” “Naked Gun,” “Airplane II: The Sequel,” and many more. Still today this North Dakotan native stays busy as ever.

Clausen was born in Minneapolis, MN but was raised in Jamestown, ND, where he received his early schooling and life lessons. He recalls, “Growing up in Jamestown really gave me a set of core values that I still hold onto today.” Jamestown is where he also started realizing his love for music through the help of his high school teachers. “I was very fortunate to play in the Jamestown High School band and to sing in the Jamestown High School choir, because both the groups had terrific conductors who had sophisticated tastes in music that rubbed off to the students.”

After high school Clausen decided to attend North Dakota State University, but at first he opted not to study music. He said, “When I first started at NDSU, I was a Mechanical Engineering major for two years and one quarter. Then music finally won out. I changed my major to music and spent the rest of my four years as a music major, graduating with a music theory degree.”

After graduating from NDSU he decided that he wanted to continue his music studies at the graduate level. Clausen attended The University of Wisconsin for a brief period before deciding that he wanted to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston. While at Berklee, he learned the skills it would take to be a professional musician. Clausen remembers, “The whole program at Berklee is designed to train a musician to be able to work in the field of commercial music and to understand what the requirements are going to be.” He continued, “I found it fascinating that, after I completed Berklee’s program and went out into the work field, the only difference between going to school at Berklee and actually working in the field was getting paid. That’s a wonderful tribute to their great program.”

After finishing Berklee’s four-year program in two and a half years, Clausen received a Professional Diploma in Composition and Arranging and immediately started teaching there. He taught there full-time for a year before making the move out to Los Angeles to try to make it as a working musician.

When Clausen first moved out to Los Angeles, he was working as a bass player in a trio for a while before he started to get composing jobs.  After a while, he started getting gigs here and there as a freelance composer/arranger for television shows, introducing himself into a new market. He said, “The biggest break that first happened to me was I got hired to work as an arranger on ‘The Donny and Marie Show.’ After a year of arranging on the show, they promoted me to the Music Director.” Clausen continued, “That was really a big break for me because it put my name in front of the public as someone who was capable of music directing a show of that magnitude.”

In 1990, Clausen got the job of composing the music for the television phenomenon, “The Simpsons,” which he still works on to this day. Working on a show of this magnitude has kept Clausen busy for nineteen years. Clausen said, “The Simpsons is a huge chunk of my weekly existence. I usually start working and composing on Sunday morning about 9 a.m., and I work until 9 o’clock at night Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday for 12 hours a day.”

In his time between his work on “The Simpsons” and the many other shows he has done, and the movies he works on, Clausen found time to release a big band jazz album called Swing Can Really Hang You Up the Most in 2005. It’s a project that he has been working on for years. “I have written a lot of different big band jazz compositions through the years, of big band, and finally decided that I wanted to put them all together in a CD compilation of my own, putting an all-star band together of musicians of my own choice, rather than relying on somebody else to do it,” Clausen said.

Over the last 30 years Alf Clausen has been a major player in the Los Angeles composing scene, which he feels very grateful for. He said, “I have been very fortunate in my career, in that I have never had to work a single day outside of the music industry.” The key to Clausen’s success is involving himself in so many different projects throughout the years. Clausen commented, “I have so many different kinds of musical interests that I can’t even begin to pick one as a desire over the other. I think one of the things that keeps me going and hopefully keeps me thinking young is the fact that I get involved doing a lot of different kinds of projects as opposed to doing the same thing all the time.”

Clausen will be appearing at the Historic Fargo Theatre on June 23rd for a Special performance put on by the NDSU BisonArts. With regard to the event, Clausen said, “The first half of the concert will be me giving an interactive discussion about composing songs for motion pictures and television, for which I will be using CD and video clips. The second half of the concert will be me conducting a local pro-jazz band playing my jazz compositions.”

To learn more about this event you can visit NDSU’s website, or the Fargo Theatre. To learn more about Alf Clausen’s music and career you can visit his website at alfclausen.com.