Composer Carlos Rafael Rivera on Scoring ‘The Queen’s Gambit’
Jon Burlingame When Carlos Rafael Rivera got the call that he would be writing the music for “The Queen’s Gambit,” he immediately did two things: He read the Walter Tevis novel, and he took up chess.More than three years later, the composer’s classically styled music for the Netflix series has become his most widely praised work. But that rich orchestral score wasn’t what writer-director Scott Frank originally envisioned.Frank initially thought a lone piano could underpin the story of an orphan whose meteoric rise in the chess world is nearly derailed by drug and alcohol abuse.“The piano was very present in the first episode,” Rivera notes.