15 Years of Simpsonic Classics

By Randall D. Larson     April 28, 2005

When the SIMPSONS completes its 16th season this May, it will have become the longest running sitcom in the history of television, surpassing OZZIE AND HARRIET, which ran on ABC from 1952 to 1966. Throughout those 16 years, THE SIMPSONS moved from an irreverent and satirical sitcom into a genuine cultural phenomenon. Its charm, though, remains in its vivid comedy and in the inherent heartfelt sense of family that exists at its core, no matter how dysfunctional things may seem in each episode. One of the show's most significant elements is its musical scoring, which runs the gamut from sweepingly orchestral, cinematic passages to Broadway-like song numbers, to seconds-long musical snippets creating a segue or a punctuating a moment.

Alf Clausen has been the mainstay of SIMPSONS music since its second season. He came on board in 1990 with, significantly, the show's first Treehouse of Horror episode, Clausen gave the show its heart and soul and much of its satirical appeal through his straightforward scores and show music.

Alf Clausen is a mild mannered and

intrinsically friendly fellow who has crafted the music of THE SIMPSONS into a consistently excellent soundscape of multi-second overtures and deft filmusical satires. While composer Danny Elfman wrote the show's theme music, Clausen provides each episode's songs and instrumental underscore music vital to the success of THE SIMPSONS, and oftentimes just as funny (for clear evidence, be sure to check out Alf's two song soundtrack CDs [on Rhino Records], Songs In The Key Of Springfield and Go Simpsonic With THE SIMPSONS).

I recently had the occasion to speak with Alf Clausen about the musical philosophy of THE SIMPSONS and how it has grown over the past fifteen years. Excellent..... Here's what he had to say:

Q: How are things going this season for you?

Alf Clausen: We're winding up the season by scoring twelve episodes in twelve weeks without a breakit's really intense.

Q: What led to that?

Alf Clausen: We had some issues early on this season and it pushed the entire post-production schedule back two months. All of the shows are late coming in. Unfortunately the airdates don't change, so all of us post-production folks just sit there on the edge waiting for completed shows to come in, and have to deal with it.

Q: Wow. So how are you dealing with it?

Alf Clausen: Just one day at a time. That's all one can do.

Q: How has the musical approach to THE SIMPSONS evolved over the last 15 years?

Alf Clausen: It really hasn't changed muchit's stayed very much the same. I think two things about the show have stayed constant the fact that the family doesn't age, and the scoring is the same.

Q: When you first came on board the show, what was your toughest challenge?

Alf Clausen: Probably the schedule. The episodes are loaded

with music startswe have an average of thirty starts per episode, and have had as many as fifty-seven music starts in one 22-minute episode. Just trying to deal with the intensity of the schedule has probably been the biggest challenge.

Q: What were your first musical directions to provide scoring and songs for the show?

Alf Clausen: I came in at the beginning of the second season. Treehouse of Horror I was my first episode. The basic directive that Matt Groening gave me early on is that "we don't look upon THE SIMPSONS as being a cartoon. We look upon it as being a drama where the characters are drawnand we'd like you to score it that way." He asked if I thought I could do that, and I said, "Absolutely!" because I had just come from drama, having scored four years of MOONLIGHTING. He thought the fit would be good, and it turned out to be a fortuitous move on everybody's part. I've been scoring the episodes dramatically ever since and I think it's really served the show well.

Q: A lot of cues, especially in recent seasons, have been very short a moment here or a brief bit of atmosphere there. How much planning does it take to come up with a 7-second cue as opposed to a longer piece of music?

Alf Clausen: It takes a lot of planning. Obviously, if you've only got seven seconds to make a statement, you have to pick your notes carefully and make sure that the mood is created from the get-go. I do seminars with young composing students, and they ask for my advice about scoring a show like THE SIMPSONSand I say: "the first thing is, you forget about intros, because there are never any introsthere's no time in a show like THE SIMPSONS. You have to state the obvious right in the face of the audience from the downbeat of bar one." It's very important to pick those notes accurately, and make sure that the mood that's created is immediate.

Q: How has the incredible success the show has achieved over the years affected the scoring and recording process?

Alf Clausen: I don't think that it really has, other than that maybe

the pressure is a little higher to maintain the qualityalthough my intent from day one has always been to maintain the quality. [Producer] James L. Brooks once made the comment that, in the beginning, nobody really had any expectations for the show, so that helped to remove the pressure of producing, and helped everybody do their best work. I think that this same mindset has prevailed throughout the series. We're very proud of the fact that so many fans recognize the work we're doing now.

Q: What is your general approach to providing underscore for the show, as opposed to songs?

Alf Clausen: They're two completely different animals. The underscore is done actually about two weeks before the episode airs, and there's very little time to do any fixingso I have to be dead on the mark the first time around. Songs are done about eight months in advance of airtime. Writing songs is just a different animalthere's more time for exposition, development musically. That's why this job is so much fun for mebecause I don't get locked in to one particular job description. Once I finish the underscore, I might all the sudden have a week off and have to write a couple of songs that are just totally different from scores. It's a lot of fun.

Q: The show's frequent references to pop culture and satires on other films have given you the chance to adapt scores from other films to fit those satires (CAPE FEARE, for example). What kind of process has that entailed?

Alf Clausen: It's an interesting process, because having to do thirty or more cues on a weekly basis, there's very little time for researchand yet I have to do research in those particular cases. What I end up doing is to identify which elements of the original scoremelodically, harmonically, rhythmically, and orchestrationallywould remind the casual listener of that particular movie. So I make a quick analysis of all of those elements, and then I incorporate variations of those elements into my own score, while making it original enough so that it really is not using the other score. We are trying to do a parody and an homage to the original score.

In the case of the Bernard Herrmann and Elmer Bernstein pieces for CAPE FEARE, one of things was the big French horn section playing these unison mystery lines and a large brass section with a tuba on the bottom. The harmonic part of the score was very sparse for the most part. It's an interesting challenge to have to pull all of those elements out, and then twist them and turn them and place them in a plastic bag, shake them up, pour them out, and see what comes out.

Q: Obviously songs take a whole different approachinvolving the writers who provide the lyric and the whole recording process. To what extent is working on THE SIMPSONS like working on a 20-minute Broadway show each week?

Alf Clausen: Oh, it is! It's really interesting and it's also

like scoring a mini-movie every week, which really is the challenge of it, because in many ways we're a dramatic series. We always have stories with some kind of moral payoff in the end we hope. There's a lot of drama, especially in the third act of the show every week. It's really like scoring a mini-movie.

Q: How much input do writers, directors, producers, and show runners have on an average episode score?

Alf Clausen: It depends on who the show-runner is at the time. The current show-runner is executive producer Al Jean, and he's really good about giving direction. He has a musical background and he has very specific ideas about the types of cues that he wants in every scene. He's not always specific about 'the French horn should be playing this and the tuba should be playing that'that's not usually part of the discussion. But he's very specific about the emotional content of each cue. That's very helpful to me, because the more direction I can get from him, the quicker the process becomes and the less pressure is on me on a weekly basis. I'm very thankful for the fact that he's as specific as he is, and has as good musical taste as he does.

Q: With the show's schedule, are you able to work exclusively on one episode at a time or does some overlap occur?

Alf Clausen: When we're doing the score, we don't overlap because we're doing one at a timeit would be just chaos to do two at a time, plus physically it would be impossible. As far as the songs go, however, they often overlap. For instance, in this particular couple of weeks stretch I'm working on an episode which is called GABF09, which is one of twenty-two shows for the season, and I'm also writing four songs for HABF05, which probably won't air until late January of next year. I'll get these songs recorded, turned in, and they'll be sent to the animators. The animators will start to do their thing, and the songs will come back to me sometime in January. By that time I'll have totally forgotten about them, and now all the sudden they come back to haunt me again, and I'll end up "sweetening" them with a full orchestra track before the episode containing the songs is aired.

Q: How awkward is it for you, as a composer, to write a piece of music and then try to work on it again so much later?

Alf Clausen: Well, it's not really that big a deal because

I am pretty thorough in how I approach these things, so when I turn the song in for the first time, it's pretty specific. When it goes to the animators, they put their spin on the emotional and visual part of the song. When it comes back, it's always adorned by visual stuff that I'm always so thrilled to see because it makes my job of doing an orchestral "sweetening" addition to that soundtrack a lot easier. By the time I'm finished, it's really a joy to see and hear the finished product.

Q: You have only rarely used Danny Elfman's Main Theme for THE SIMPSONS during the episode scores. Is there a reason for this?

Alf Clausen: Doing theme adaptations in various styles becomes a challenge for me because of that fact that Danny's theme consists of only about three and a half bars of a "hookable" melody, per se. It's sometimes difficult to adapt the theme into other styles because there's not a lot to grab onto melodically. Which is fine; it just is what it is. After fifteen years, how do I feel about it? Well, I think it's held up very well, and there's no mistaking what the show is whenever you hear the themeit's become so identifiable to the general public.

Q: What about the End Titles, where you have occasionally modified the show's theme music into specific variants that fit that episode? How does that process work?

Alf Clausen: Once again it's kind of an analysis process of what kind of hooks there aremelodically, harmonically, rhythmically, orchestrationallythat the public would react to when they hear a salsa piece, for instance. Then trying to adapt the thematic elements that I can find that will lend themselves to being presented in this new framework. Once the public hears it, they say, "well, that's a great salsa piece," like in the end of "Who Shot Mr. Burns." First of all, it's a great salsa groove and it's also based on the Simpsons Theme. It's an interesting challenge.

Q: Has the idea of creating character-specific themes to link episodes together ever arisen?

Alf Clausen: Well, I haven't been asked to do that and I think it's probably a wise move on the producers' part, because I try to score each episode as a mini-movietrying to make each episode have some kind of a musical arc from beginning to end if the story will support it. Oftentimes it doesn't support it because the stories, as you know, jump all over the place and there are a couple of stories that go on at the same time. For the most part I have resisted writing themes for characterswith the exception of Mr. Burns; I have a theme for him. I have a Police Chief Wiggum theme, I have a Krusty the Clown theme, but I think that's it.

Q: Will we ever see a CD released of the show's instrumental underscores, or isn't there a viable market for that?

Alf Clausen: Frankly, I think that there is a market for it; I just don't think that the

people in charge really understand that. I wish that I could release an underscore CD. The tough part of it is that the cues are awfully short for the most partand it would be difficult to put together any kind of a score album that would make sense. It would be easier to go back into the earlier episodes when we actually did longer music cuesand there was a very specific reason for that: there were fewer commercials! As the years have gone on, the shows have become shorter because of increased commercial time, yet the stories basically stay the same length. Guess what takes the hit: music gets trimmed. I would love to see a score album. I'm also working on getting together a third song album. I don't have any news yet but I'm hoping that it's going to work out.

Q: Do you ever feel restricted by your commitment to the showby not being able to do other things?

Alf Clausen: I find an occasional opportunity to do other thingsI had a real interesting and fun experience at the end of 2003 and recorded my own big band jazz album. I assembled a group of all-star LA jazz players and recorded ten tracks; and it's finally all edited and mixed. I'm in the process of getting the actual packaging together and getting an artist to do some artwork, et cetera, and it just takes a lot of time. Since THE SIMPSONS doesn't allow me a lot of time at the moment, it's slow going. My hunch is that it's going to be on my website before too long [http://alfclausen.com]. During this twelve-shows-in-twelve-weeks situation, everything else has kind of ground to a halt, so we're probably looking at late summer.

Q: Any other television or film work coming up?

Alf Clausen: Well, I would like to do a nice feature film here and there. During THE SIMPSONS run I was also the musical director for THE BETTE MIDLER SHOW on CBS for a year, and I scored THE CRITIC, the animated show on ABC. There is time to do some other stuff occasionally but THE SIMPSONS is pretty intense. When I have time off I really relish the time off to recharge and get the creative juices back in place.

Q: Speaking of THE CRITIC, how did your musical approach to that show contrast with that of THE SIMPSONS?

Alf Clausen: It was very much like THE SIMPSONS, given the fact that it was created by our current executive producer, Al Jean, and his partner Mike Reiss. Al and Mike basically had the same musical thrustthey wanted to do songs, and they wanted to do underscores that covered all sorts of types of period-style pieces. We used an acoustic orchestra with 35 players on that show as well, and it was a lot of fun.

Q: Do you do any collaborations, especially with the hectic schedule?

Alf Clausen: I have a right-hand man whose name is Dell Hake, and he is my orchestrator, arranger, and assistant conductor. He does the arrangements of many of the songs that I've written through the years of Broadway-style things, and he's very versatile and very creative. I'm very grateful for his help.

Q: What's coming up for you concerning music Simpsonic?

Alf Clausen: I think that's pretty much it. I think the big joy about doing this series is that Matt Groening, bless his heart, has remained true to the original vision of using acoustic music on the show. I know the pressure is brought to bear sometimes by the higher-ups saying 'why do we need to do this? It's so expensive.' And he says, since the turnaround rate for animation is so quick, the music helps smooth out the sometimes "rough-around-the-edges" animation and give it a touch of class it might not have otherwise. I think that's a very wise call on his part, and I think it's turned out to be really true. We all owe him a lot for that vision.

Thanks to Antonia Coffman at 20th Century Fox for coordinating this interview and to Alf Clausen for his time and assistance and for fifteen years of wonderfully Simpsonic compositions!

For questions or comments, contact the author at Soundtrax@cinescape.com