Obituary: The Woman Who Taught a Flooded City to Sing Again

She would not let them call it a loss, though by any accounting it was one. When the low wards of her coastal city were given over to the water years ago and their people scattered inland to the relocation blocks, Marisol Enriquez — choirmaster, retired schoolteacher, immovable object — did the only thing she knew how to do with grief: she scheduled a rehearsal. She spent a decade tracking down her displaced singers across three resettlement districts, a soprano here, a whole family of tenors there, and she rebuilt her chorus voice by voice until it was larger than the one the sea had taken. They sang in gymnasiums and transit halls and, once, memorably, on the new seawall itself, facing the water that had rearranged all their lives. She died this week at ninety-one, unaugmented, unhurried, having outlived the argument that her city was finished. "A neighborhood is only gone," she liked to say, "when it stops making a sound." Hers has not stopped yet.