After 27 years of making jaunty cartoon music for The Simpsons, longtime composer Alf Clausen has been fired from the show. That’s according to Variety, which reports that Simpsons producer Richard Sakai recently called Clausen and told him that the show is looking for “a different kind of music,” so someone different will be scoring the series from now on. Considering how omnipresent and iconic Clausen’s score has been, though, it seems likely that any “different kind of music” will be a huge change for The Simpsons.
Variety expects that this decision was because of money, which has been a regular issue for the show over the last few years, with the story saying that the costs for scoring the series “routinely run into the millions of dollars per year” because of Matt Groening’s insistence that it use a 35-piece orchestra for every episode. It’s unclear which cheap scab will be hired to replace Clausen, but Danny Elfman’s famous Simpsons theme will most likely stick around.
Clausen won two Emmy awards for his work on The Simpsons, and he has been nominated 21 times on top of that. His final episode was the season 28 finale, which aired earlier this year.