Randolph
Together, they sang a musical round he had taught them. It was about fireflies.
And then, like magic, fireflies rose up around the Revelers, and started blinking in rhythm with the song.
“It was pretty phenomenal,” Nora Skolnick, one of the singers there that night, recalled. “None of us could really believe it was happening.”
The music director, then the artistic director, of Revels North from 1989 to 2005, Gay died on April 30 at Joslyn House in Randolph, surrounded by a group of close friends, after being treated for kidney failure and diabetes. He was 76.
What Skolnick referred to as “firefly moments” — partly of this earth, partly something else — were the kind of experiences Gay facilitated throughout his life.
Though he never married or had children, “he sure had family,” said Sharon Groblicki, a friend of Gay’s for 27 years who worked with him in several capacities at Revels North, a nonprofit arts organization now based in White River Junction.
“He made so many of us family, just by the fact that we all knew him,” she added.
The family that Gay was born into, like the one he found along the way, was captivated by music. His mother, Myrtle Gay, was a church soloist. His father, Donald Gay, was a high school musical director and a piano technician. Born in Dover, N.H., in 1940, Gay spent most of his childhood in Auburn, Maine.
“In that house, how could you not be musical?” said his sister, Martha Gay Runnerstrom, herself a former music teacher.
He was especially fond of the pipe organ, which he saw as a majestic, transcendent instrument.
“He used to walk all the way from Auburn across the Androscoggin River bridge to Lewiston to practice at the cathedral there,” Runnerstrom said. “He did that many times.”
Though Gay and his siblings were raised Baptist, Gay played organ at a number of churches through his adolescence, and was especially taken with Episcopalianism.
“The Baptist church we went to was very folksy and family-oriented,” Runnerstrom recalled. “Not that David wasn’t that way, but I think he liked the ritual and the ceremony of Episcopalianism.” It appealed to the same parts of him that loved performance, and the stage, she said. Per his request, his funeral service was held in the high Episcopal tradition.
After high school, Gay went on to attend Eastern University, then called Eastern Baptist College, in St. Davids, Pa., where he majored in psychology. Though he considered several career paths — he had tentatively planned on becoming a psychologist, and toyed with the idea of studying for Episcopalian priesthood — “it wasn’t long before he was pulled back to the music,” Runnerstrom said.
Shortly after college, Gay played keyboard in a Los Angeles rock band called Pilot. He relocated to Boston in the early 1970s, where he performed with the Renaissance and medieval-era musical group Quadrivium, followed by the quintet Alexander’s Feast.
In 1977, he formed his own musical community with Northern Harmony, which traveled around New England in celebration of early, world and contemporary music and theater. He also played keyboard and harp for the instrumental trio Filigree Deep, and performed with the traveling folk festival Green Mountain Crossing.
Though his spirituality continued to be important to him, it was not confined to a singular faith.
His former music colleague and housemate in Boston, Michael Cicone, remembers that Gay’s bedroom was “fully stocked with Tibetan symbology” when they lived together in the early 1990s.
“I think he saw that Eastern spiritual philosophy as a way to find meaning in the world,” Cicone added.
In keeping with this non-denominational mysticism, Gay was also a practiced reader of Tarot.
He had a “psychic sense,” for which Tarot cards were one vehicle, said Susan Robbins, his former colleague and friend of 46 years.
“On a sort of psycho-spiritual level, he had the ability to see to the core of somebody, to see what their potential was and what was holding them back,” Robbins recalled. “He was very attuned to the archetypes of human nature, and believed there was some great spirit moving through each one of us, connecting us all.”
This was part of what made him such an inspirational artistic director — he brought out in people what they didn’t think they could do.
Perhaps more than anywhere else, Gay parsed his spirituality through music, and through the tight-knit community that music fostered. Groblicki remembers taking voice lessons with him, years before they co-directed Revels North shows together.
“Singing was not just words with him,” she said. “He’d drop little pearls that were astounding. He’d say things offhand that were profound and life-changing.”
After one such voice lesson left Groblicki particularly emotional, Gay told her, “Do you know why that is? It’s because this is the instrument that God gave you. You came to life with this instrument, and it’s all yours.”
“Those kinds of insights just rolled right off him,” Groblicki said.
This enthusiasm extended into his artistic vision.
“His shows were always based on things he loved, which usually had at least one foot in the realm of the fantastic,” Cicone recalled. Arthurian legend, for example, or fairies.
Dragons, too, were a magical creature for which Gay had a special affinity — the bumper sticker on his car read, “Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crispy and taste good with ketchup.”
On his birthday, the children in Revels North would give him dragons to add to his collection.
“You have to be careful when you introduce a new dragon to the household,” he used to tell them. “Where I put this one is very important.”
Gay’s “quirky sensibility,” as Robbins called it, went hand in hand with his awareness of the unseen forces that govern the human world.
“He had a vivid imagination, and a connection to those energies that are beyond what we are typically aware of,” she said. “Being attuned to the fairy world, or to the cycles of the moon, was all part of his relationship to the natural world and its mysteries.”
His distinct countenance — bald head, bushy white beard, round spectacles and often a head-to-toe ensemble of black, or else a flowing, batik-style button-up — was in keeping with these aspects of his personality, friends and colleagues said.
“He was poetic-looking,” Revels North singer Bob Metz recalled. “We used to think of him as a wizard, a magical person.”
In interviews with friends and colleagues, that word, “magical,” came up again and again, both to describe his personality and his creative style — which were deeply bound up in one another.
His shows tended to convey a distinct message, recalled Hannah Lindner-Finlay, who first met Gay when she was 5 years old. She always loved his Christmas Revels reading of Fra Giovanni Giocondo’s Letter to a Friend, in which the Italian priest, architect and classical scholar wrote to the Countess Allagia Aldobrandeschi on Christmas Eve in 1513.
In the letter, Giocondo gently reminds the Countess: “Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty beneath its covering, that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven.” He urges her, “Take peace! The gloom of world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy.”
For Lindner-Finlay, no one’s rendition of the letter could ever come close to Gay’s.
“To me, it encapsulates the gift David gave to us all — and that he strove to give to the audience,” she wrote in a recent email. That gift was one “grounded in people and love and joy in the midst of the struggles of life.”
Metz agreed. In one of the first Revels North shows Metz ever sang in, he looked down into the audience and saw a child with a developmental disability.
“She was standing on her father’s lap, just radiantly beaming, and her father was weeping,” Metz recalled. “This is the magic that David brings to us. He creates these moments that just move people at a time when they’re really vulnerable, like the holiday season.”
And so, when Gay himself grew more and more vulnerable physically, members of his makeshift family stepped up to the plate, shuttling him back and forth to dialysis and doctor appointments.
“It was an honor for us to be there for him,” Groblicki said.
He’d been on dialysis for seven years when he made the decision to end the treatment that was keeping him alive.
“His body was just so worn out,” said Metz. “He talked the decision over with many of us, and we all respected him for it.”
Ten days before he died, Revels North organized an evening of song at the Norwich Congregational Church. More than 100 people gathered to sing under Gay’s musical direction for the last time. As he had in his prime, he infused the event with the types of aphorisms that had become his trademark: “Put your ears on opposite ends of the wall.”
“Sing out of another person’s mouth.”
“Make a cathedral in the back of your throat.”
Lindner-Finlay attended Gay’s sing with her three-month-old, Alder, who Gay had not yet met. At one point, Alder started crying, “and for a second I didn’t really know what I should do,” said Lindner-Finlay. “Then David looked out over the audience and cried out, ‘Our babies have had babies!’ It was a very sweet moment, that showed he understood what it meant for us all to be there together.”
Groblicki, for her part, still sings Gay’s songs when she gardens, as a reminder of what he taught her: “That life, despite its shadows, is good. And singing is like heightened life.”
EmmaJean Holley can be reached at eholley@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.