Doctor Who episode Rosa makes great use of its music. Composer Segun Akinola’s score is effective throughout, particularly the theme for civil rights icon Rosa Parks herself, an uplifting fanfare that’s not unlike a superhero anthem (and quite right too).
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But it’s the final song that many viewers may be interested in – an emotional tune written and sung by Andra Day that accompanies Rosa’s triumphant stand against the segregation of black people on buses in 1950s America and continues up to the moving final scenes where the Doctor and her friends open the Tardis doors to look at the asteroid named after Rosa.
Rise Up is a single from Day’s debut album Cheers To the Fall and couldn’t be more appropriate for those scenes lyrically, as well as musically, echoing as it does the words of Maya Angelou’s famous poem Still I Rise.
Day cites her early influences as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Dinah Washington, all of whom were alive during the events described in this episode of Doctor Who.
Listen to Rise Up again below…
Doctor Who continues on Sundays on BBC1
This article was originally published on 21 October 2018
from Radio Times https://ift.tt/2PC5KC8
