A Rooftop Choir in Seattle Sings to the Reservoirs It Is Trying to Save

SEATTLE — On the second Sunday of each month, a hundred voices gather on a downtown rooftop and sing the reservoir levels aloud. The Cascade Commons Choir, founded last spring by retired music teacher Harold Nakagawa, sets the region's water data to song — a rising melody for a full reservoir, a descending one for a low. This month's reading sent the chorus into a minor key, and the crowd of nearly four hundred, larger than the last, listened in the dusk without speaking. "People cannot hold a number like a temperature anomaly," Nakagawa said. "But they can hold a note that falls." The choir shares its figures with the Oceanic & Atmospheric Assembly, whose regional office confirmed them as accurate. What began as one teacher's grief has become a monthly civic ritual, part concert and part reckoning. "We are not protesting," said soprano Mei Lawson, twenty-four. "We are just refusing to let it be silent."