Alf Clausen - Career

Career

Clausen moved to Los Angeles, California in 1967 in search of television work, wanting to became a full-time composer. For nine years he did some arrangement work for singers, ghostwriting and other composing jobs such as commercial jingles, as well as working as a teacher, music copyist and a bassist. He worked as a copyist on "Come On Get Happy", the theme song to The Partridge Family. He eventually became a score writer and later the music director and conductor for Donny & Marie between 1976 and 1979. Initially he was requested to write an emergency chart for the following day, but he was hired as a score writer and continued writing and conducting on the show, before replacing Tommy Oliver as music director. When the show moved to Utah, Clausen flew there each week from Los Angeles to record the score. He had the same role on The Mary Tyler Moore Hour in 1979. In 1981 he was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement In Music Direction for Omnibus.

Clausen served as the composer for the series Moonlighting from 1985 to 1989, scoring 63 of the 65 episodes. His favorite episode to score was the episode "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice", which featured two lengthy black and white dream sequences and enjoyed the episode "Atomic Shakespeare", also a fantasy episode. He received an Emmy nomination for each episode in the category Outstanding Achievement In Music Composition For A Series (Dramatic Underscore) in 1986 and 1987, earning two more nominations over the next two years for the episodes "Here's Living with You, Kid" and "A Womb with a View". In 1988 and 1989 he also received nominations for the Emmy for Outstanding Achievement In Music Direction. He was also the composer on ALF from 1986 to 1990.

Other television compositions included Wizards and Warriors (1983), Fame (1984), Lime Street (1985), Christine Cromwell (1989) and My Life and Times (1991) as well as the television films Murder in Three Acts (1986), Double Agent (1987), Police Story: The Watch Commander (1988), My First Love (1988), She Knows Too Much (1989) and the feature film Number One with a Bullet (1987). He also conducted the orchestras and, for some, provided additional music for several films including The Beastmaster (1982), Airplane II: The Sequel (1982), Splash (1984), Weird Science (1985), Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), Dragnet (1987) and The Naked Gun (1988).