Rafael Marino Arcaro

2nd Prize Composition 2026

Rafael Marino Arcaro is a Brazilian composer now based between Berlin and London. His music emerges from the sensibilities of his rural childhood – fruit trees, insects, nighttime creatures – and his reflections on Brazilian artistic identity. Known for an aesthetic of clarity and restraint, he writes works that carry a flavour of sour mango and cotton candy. His pieces are emotionally direct yet tinged with a kind of serious playfulness and, sometimes, dire violence.

invention in language of child, op. 22
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a cloudless night; grandma forgot me outside and I forgot bedtime and spent the whole night with ants and bats making friends with the dark a cold dewy-winter-dawn grew ten metres and swallowed down the night in a gulp