Carlos Rafael Rivera

A composer whose works echo his multicultural life spent in both America and Guatemala, Carlos Rafael Rivera was born August 18, 1970 in Washington D.C. He grew up in Florida and attained a doctorate in musical arts from the University of Southern California. He has composed pieces for a variety of musical organizations including the Miami Symphony Orchestra, where he was the Composer-in-Residence, and his work has been interpreted by the Los Angeles Guitar Quintet, the Chicago Sinfonietta, and Arturo Sandoval, as well as many others. He established himself as an in-demand studio musician in addition to his composing resume, and he began writing and performing on film and television scores in the late 1990s, garnering his first credit on the 1999 TV movie Brotherhood of Murder. In 2014 writer/director Scott Frank tapped him to compose some of the music for Frank’s big-screen adaptation of the crime novel A Walk Among the Tombstones. They quickly formed a strong working relationship that led to Rivera writing the score for Frank’s western series Godless, a project that won the composer an Emmy. They collaborated again on the miniseries The Queen’s Gambit in 2020.