“He was tireless, inspired, and always up for the musical challenges we threw at him. I called him our secret weapon,” Matt Groening says of Emmy-winning composer who scored nearly 600 episodes

Alf Clausen, the longtime composer on The Simpsons who scored countless iconic moments on the animated series, has died at the age of 84.

The Emmy-winning composer died Thursday at his home in Los Angeles following an eight-year battle with progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), Clausen’s daughter told the Hollywood Reporter.

Clausen served as composer on The Simpsons from the series’ second season in 1990 (starting with the inaugural “Treehouse of Horror” episode) through its 28th season in 2017, after which he was — to the chagrin of the show’s fans — fired in a controversial cost-cutting move. However, Clausen maintained the honorary title of “Composer Emeritus” on subsequent seasons.

“Alf was the ‘Man of a Thousand Music Cues’ — actually probably more than 10,000 — during his decades on The Simpsons,” creator Matt Groening told Variety. “He was tireless, inspired, and always up for the musical challenges we threw at him. I called him our secret weapon.”

The Minneapolis-born, North Dakota-raised, and Berklee College of Music-educated Clausen began his career in movies and television in the mid-Seventies, working his way up from music copyist and arranger to orchestrater (including on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) to conductor to composer, with the TV series Moonlighting his first major and prolonged gig in the role; Clausen received six of his unprecedented 30 Emmy nominations for his work on Moonlighting.

Following a stint as the composer (fittingly, given his name) on Alf, Clausen was enlisted to join The Simpsons during to the Fox series’ second season. While the show’s famed opening theme was created by Danny Elfman (though Clausen rearranged it beginning in Season 3), Clausen scored hundreds of memorable moments in Springfield over the course of nearly 600 episodes, with Clausen reportedly commanding a 35-piece orchestra for each show.

“I was posed the question, ‘Would you like to score an animated show?’ and I said, ‘No,’” Clausen told Television Academy Foundation website The Interviews in 2015. “I said, ‘I just got off of four years of Moonlighting, and I really want to be a drama composer. I’m more interested in doing longform feature films.’”

However, Groening managed to persuade Clausen to take the assignment. “[Groening] said he didn’t want it scored like a typical Warner Bros. cartoon. He didn’t want it scored like a typical Disney cartoon,” Clausen added. “He wanted something different.”

Clausen’s Simpsons work was collected for a trio of albums showcasing his scores: 1997’s Songs in the Key of Springfield, 1999’s Go Simpsonic with The Simpsons, and 2007’s The Simpsons: Testify. Clausen was also nominated for over 20 Primetime Emmys for his work on The Simpsons, resulting in two wins for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Music and Lyrics: First in 1998 for “We Put The Spring In Springfield” and again the following year for You’re Checkin’ In.”

Following Clausen’s dismissal from The Simpsons, the series brought the music production company Bleeding Fingers Music, which was founded by Hans Zimmer, Russell Emanuel and Steve Kofsky; Zimmer notably scored The Simpsons Movie, with a spurned Clausen quipping at the time, “Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.”

Clausen would later file a lawsuit against Fox and The Simpsons producers in 2019, claiming his firing was due to ageism; the majority of the lawsuit was dismissed by a judge, and Clausen ultimately settled the case in 2022.