Everyone loves a good detective story and Netflix’s new series, Dept Q, is no different. Carl Morck (Matthew Goode) is your classic gruff, standoffish detective who will stop at nothing to find justice. As you can imagine, he’s not the greatest coworker, which is part of the reason he finds himself relegated to Department Q. This newly formed unit will focus wholly on cold cases and despite his initial anger at this relegation, he begins to find his purpose again.

Sonically tracking the emotional journey of Carl is composer Carlos Rafael Rivera. Dept Q marks his fifth collaboration with showrunner Scott Frank. The two previously teamed up for one of Netflix’s most popular shows, The Queen’s Gambit. Dept Q asked Rivera to dive into Scottish instruments to make sense of Carl’s troubled headspace. Carlos Rafael Rivera chatted with Beyond the Cinerama Dome to discuss his longtime friendship with Scott Frank, how Ozzy Osborne’s Blizzard of Ozz changed his life, and the ascending and descending melodies of Dept Q that serve as the backbone of the score. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Beyond the Cinerama Dome: What made you pick up your first instrument? And how did you get into scoring film and TV?

Carlos Rafael Rivera: I was born in Washington, D.C., and when I was three I moved to Miami. When I was six, I moved to Guatemala, then Costa Rica at nine, and Panama at eleven. When I was thirteen, I moved back to Costa Rica and at fourteen, I moved to Miami, where I live now.

The guitar happened when I was eleven. We were in Panama and my dad wanted to take guitar lessons. He figured my brother and I would come along for the ride. I had taken piano lessons in Guatemala, but I basically did my first recital and then we moved to Costa Rica and piano lessons ended.

I think out of the three of us, I was the only one practicing guitar for our weekly lessons. It’s only because I got really into the pictures in the workbook. There's this book called The Carcassi Guitar Method, and it showed a picture of someone playing who looked so serious. I was like, why so serious? Now I'm thinking of Batman (laughs). There were the scales and notes in the book, and I was like, what is all that stuff?

I started playing guitar, and then my brother joined a rock band. He goes to a religious retreat, a Christian retreat. He comes back with an Ozzy Osborne album, like on a cassette with a cross drawn upside down. I'm like, what is that?

He says it's the coolest music ever. He puts on the tape and it's Blizzard of Ozz by Ozzy Osbourne. I hear this song and this is the moment I think music kind of connected for me. It's the big bang thing. I'm listening to this piece called “Revelation (Mother Earth),” and there's this guitar solo by Randy Rhoads. I noticed about halfway through that I was smiling from ear to ear. I was like, whatever that is, I want in.

I don't know if you've had something like that. A kind of epiphany of connection that you cannot stop. That was how it started. How I became a professional and how I'm getting to talk to you. I studied composition at USC, but I was also teaching privately to make ends meet. I was teaching at the Pasadena Conservatory. I was a TA at the University of Southern California. I was also working for a company called Taxi, listening to music and critiquing it.

I was doing any kind of job to make ends meet. One of my private students was Scott Frank, who is the director of projects I’ve worked on like Dept Q, Queen's Gambit, Godless, and A Walk Among the Tombstones. This was ten years before I even got involved with him professionally. He was my guitar student in Hollywood. I couldn't believe I had this guy to live through vicariously, you know? That friend who does the crazy stuff, but you wouldn't.

He would tell me stories and I was like, that's so cool, but let's do some scales (laughs). It wasn't until five years after we started lessons that he went and made his first movie as a director. Up until then, he’d been a writer. He had done Minority Report, Out of Sight, all these big movies. It was then that he said, Carlos, we've been doing this for a long time, but you've never asked me to hook you up. I go, yeah, because in your life, I'm your guitar teacher, and I want to stay that way because I like the relationship. I did like the relationship. I wasn't expecting anything.

Scott said, I'm working on something if you'd like to help me. He said, you're not going to get the job, but you can at least get your feet wet and get a feel for the industry. That was how I started writing music for him. He sent me the screenplay and I started writing for him.

That movie didn't happen and I ended up moving to Miami to continue my academic career at the University of Miami School of Music. Then A Walk Among the Tombstones came out and that was my first job.

I knew that you had multiple collaborations with Scott, but I didn’t realize it went this far back. What’s the dynamic between the two of you now, given how you started?

It's insane because it's very pseudo-professional. We love each other deeply. We do, but it's also very professional. I owe him everything. He is literally the forger of my career and my advocate after my first job. After he was my second job. He was my third job, and the third job was The Queen's Gambit.

Once that happened, it's like the floodgates opened and work started really coming in from other folks hwo caught on or got into the music or whatever it was. Scott's like that with just about everyone he collaborates with. If he likes them and believes in them, he pushes hard. Mad respect to people like that in the world. I'm lucky to know him.

I read that the editor and the sound designer from Dept Q also have a long history with Scott. In terms of people you work very closely with, how does that familiarity add to the ease you were able to come into this project with?

I think it's so weird because I've never felt like the work has gotten easier. I've always felt like it's just as hard, and I'm just as terrified about getting it right or understanding how to do this. I'm not just saying that, I really sincerely mean it.

It's like family, you know? A functional one, thank God. This team is really strong. It also goes back to Tom Kramer, my music editor, and Wylie Stateman, who was the sound designer on A Walk Among the Tombstones, which was my first job.

I was working on it in 2012, and when I got to meet Wylie, I couldn't believe it. He’d done the sound for Django Unchained and other Tarantino films. We call him Obi-Wan Kenobi for a reason. He's so knowledgeable. If you look Wylie Stateman up, you'll be like, oh my God. He goes back to the ’80s. He's done some of the biggest films and he's truly a master at his craft. I've learned so much from him. Anytime he calls me he goes, hey, do you have a minute? I’m always like, yes.

Michelle Tesoro is the editor for Dept Q. The first job I worked with her was Godless in 2017. So it's almost eight, nine years now. I really respect her. I asked her to move something a few frames in one of the chess games we were doing in Queen's Gambit and and she's like, fuck no. I was like, okay, sorry, I'm going to try to make it work then.

You have to make the music line up. Sometimes it's just two, three frames, precious frames, but it's about respecting the edit. Our job as composers is to write to the cut no matter what. I make it sound like Michelle's difficult, but that’s not at all what I mean. She's amazing.

When something can't move, it shouldn't. It's not about music. It's about the picture and helping to tell the story. You kind of learn your place in that process.

I made it through the first three episodes of Dept Q and I'm thoroughly enjoying myself. The story is fascinating and the press conference at the end of the second episode is such a great moment. It's this really intense moment, but your score is a very gentle piano. Can you talk a little bit about this very intense balance that you had to manage between the two emotions that are battling in this scene?

It's so funny. I'm a huge fan of long-line melody writing, and I'm so grateful that you pay attention to the music at all. I'm not writing from the point of view that music needs to be heard. I think the story needs to be liked and loved, hopefully. My job as a contributor, I help make it all work.

That one press conference at the end of episode two, the ferry montage at the end of episode one, both were definitely big challenges. The press conference is really one of the examples of getting to write a long-line melody. The episode one ending is another example of having to write a long-line melody. The end of episode one is really a montage, so there is no dialogue. Therefore, the music really is going to be prominent and featured.

When you have episode two, it's one of those where it's all about what's being said and what we're seeing. We're seeing Carl have the panic attack, you're seeing the bad people realize their case is being investigated, and that moment of spilling the coffee is really something I wanted to punctuate with music and score the moment the coffee starts to spill.

That sets off the panic attack that Carl’s going to start having. The idea is to build this until he has to walk offstage. That was one thing. Then there’s the escape and Akram showing up to help. I'm looking at it as something that had to be thought of structurally. You can't just be writing music straight through like a bulldozer. You have to think of each one of these as individual moments.

Piano is something that's weaving throughout that scene, but it also has guitars for the aggressive stuff when the builds are happening. Especially when Akram is talking to Carl at the end of that episode. There’s an actual melody that you kind of don't hear, but you've implied it because we've already been hearing it, which is this ascending thing.

There's a long melody that plays when Carl’s investigating his attack. To be really nerdy, anything that has to do with the team doing their work, the melodies go up. For Carl, his melody goes down, his melody is descending. The main title has this descending melody because his life is a man in freefall.

I wanted to kind of play that all these sorts of things are bad, but when investigating, when relationships are building, or when things are moving in a certain way, you feel the melody going up.

At the end of the day, you hope it lands. There are so many cuts that are going to happen and you want to make sure you're judicious as to what you're going to punctuate. Especially as the edit becomes shorter from the first version. The press conference was longer and then it got shorter, so you have to make adjustments and conform the music to the picture and still try to nail those moments. It's always a very crafty gig.

The turnaround time is usually short isn't it? In terms of composers?

Yeah, but with Scott it's not because we treat it like a movie. I've been on board with this series since 2023. With Scott, he sent in the screenplay and even before he sent me the screenplay, he told me we were going to do this. I started reading the Department Q novels and then once I got the script for episode one, I started writing.

What I do with Scott is I'll make a script movie on iMovie. I'll grab the screenplay and I'll put the words in the program, so I'll make a QuickTime movie at a reading pace that you can follow and read. I write music to that and then he gets a sense. It'll maybe help him think of a shot or how to shoot it even, but also he'll tell me if it sucks (laughs).

Wylie also invented something very unique called a rolling mix, which we've been able to do with our productions with them. On most productions, there's temporary music and temporary sound, and those things are going along with the edit. They're editing to temporary music until we have to replace it with the composer and the final sound.

We do a rolling mix instead, meaning that from the beginning, the edit has the real sound and the real music. There is no temporary music and no temporary sound. The cue may not sound great, but it's already kind of structurally there. Then I'm just finessing as we go along, you know?

The same thing is happening with sound. The sound you hear of the rain is the sound of the rain that's going to be there. It won't be replaced with other rain sounds. What that helps us do is collaborate. There's a lot of collaboration between sound and music in order to kind of get who takes the lead.

There's one moment in episode one when he's investigating his shooting. He's on the laptop before he has his first panic moment. There’s a moment where a guy comes out and a gunshot happens. The music was doing something, and the gunshot was really kind of becoming confused with the score. I called Wiley and said, dude, maybe you can help me out here just to get rid of the high end of the gun or something, just so it still feels like a boom, but not crack, because it's making it sound like the score has a problem as opposed to very clearly letting the score be.

He was very gracious about that and vice versa. These things have happened. That kind of collaboration is more unique, I think, than normal. I do think it helps the sound world to be at its best because it's not just me, it's me and Wiley and his team and my team.

That sounds like the way all movies and TV shows should be done. It doesn't seem like it should wait until the end. It's just, like you said, a collaborative process.

Yeah, but schedules never permit it. I think it's a lot more work for sound and music and probably more costly for most people doing line item budgets. They're like, wait, it costs a lot more money because you're always having to conform to the cut. The cut is always evolving. Ideally, a composer comes in with the cut locked. Those days are gone, but you'll come in now to something 80%, 90% locked.

I'm coming in at 0%. I'm writing music to scenes that are going to get killed and then what happens? I already wrote music. It kind of creates a different kind of problem. It's mostly budgetary, even though it is ideal.

A unique aspect of the score is the Bodhrán and Uilleann pipes. Can you talk about the research that went into building the components of your score?

It varies from project to project, depending on the amount of time you have. I think the main thing I was concerned about was being honest in portraying our location without being overt. You wouldn’t hear a bagpipe sound every time Carl appeared on the screen, you know?

Scott wanted the muscularity of the music to be present. He sent me a playlist of stuff that had Dropkick Murphys and these other bands that were Scottish folk, tartan rockers, that kind of thing. Music that was a very kind of strong, aggressive type. He wanted that to be reflected in the score, so you do have a lot of big drum sounds.

There's a couple big moments that represent Carl's outward aggression to the world. When Carl is in his office for the first time downstairs, you hear acoustic guitar and it's more like his vulnerable side. He's alone and you're hearing much more vulnerable, emotional, hopefully not schmaltzy music. You want to portray that in the score.

For Carl, we had to connect with him and music was a good vehicle for that. Otherwise, he’s totally unlikable. You kind of have to find that sense of, oh, he's okay, he's not so bad. Over the course of the show, you do discover that his tension is just a product of a lot of his damaged goods, as they say.

For the Bodhrán, we got this guy, Brian Kilgore, to play the drum. It's something very Scottish. It’s about having a bit of that color doesn’t overtly hit you in the face. It's there if you want to hear it in the main title, for sure. You got to lean in. It's not like, hello, this is Scottish, you know? It's more like the attitude comes from the Scottish drums and the rest of the score. It's somewhat present, but it's really about the character and your scoring character.

Always, above everything else, even above story sometimes (the story is taking care of itself), the character sometimes needs support and not for the acting, but for what's not being said or what's not being seen.

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