Russ Tapp - Co-Founder
Thanks for stopping by our site.
I am a longtime Fort Worth Texan starting a new life here in Amarillo after being in full time Evangelical Worship Ministry for over 23 years.
I am a proud father of two children, Lea 24 & David 23. They are the pride of my life and a Father could not love any two kids more than I do these two.
I am currently serving with my business partner and friend Rick as co-Music Director/Choir Master at St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in Pampa, TX.
I also head up our Media division of RnR Fusion. I specialize in computer graphic design, video production/editing, web design, web hosting, web maintenance and promotional graphic design. I have a large collection of videos featured on SermonSpice.com which reaches around the world. Any given Sunday one of my creations is being used in churches from Singapore to England to Australia to South Africa to Germany to all over the United States.
My desire is to bring a high level of excellence and authentic beauty in my music and visual creations to better our connection with God and his children in the world.
Rick Land - Co-Founder
Thank you for visiting our website!
I was born and raised in the “wide open” Texas Panhandle (Pampa, to be exact) on the 21st of October 1950. My mother was a church musician and still plays each week (at age 83) in their local Baptist church in Memphis, Texas. My father, a gifted entrepreneur, has made and lost more money than I will ever see!
I was a precocious kid and picked out tunes at the piano at the age of 3 when Mom decided that I needed lessons to learn how to read music! She was my mentor and guide, making sure I had good teachers and role models.
JUST DO IT!
During those years in Pampa, we were profoundly blessed with outstanding school music programs as well as excellent private teachers throughout the community. No one knew how to teach music to a three year old in those days. I even refused to play for my first piano recital ( I think I was just being stubborn). The lessons stopped and I began again in earnest during my third grade year when we lived in Electra, Texas.
I vividly remember my teacher, Mrs. Donnely...her wonderful old upright piano and warm, beautiful home with all the windows thrown wide open on those balmy afternoons. I played for Sunday school, youth groups and sightread through all my mothers song books from the 40’s while she cooked dinner.
We moved back to Pampa one year later and I again began lessons but…the single most influential person in my life was Eloise Lane, my 4th grade music teacher at Sam Houston Elementary. She found out I could sight read and I was asked to accompany the school mixed choir and our daily music class. She nurtured me and taught me how to count, play rhythmically and of course, sight read everything!
I continued accompanying throughout the remainder of my junior and senior high school years and began piano studies with Fidelia Yoder in 7th grade through the end of my senior year. The woman was phenomenal! My lessons were Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 7 AM! I have countless stories of gifted professional musicians who grew up in Pampa during those remarkable years.
My High School choral directors were Dr. Hugh Sanders and Billy Neal Davis. After such extraordinary choral experiences I was ruined for life, literally... it was not until I moved to Dallas that I even came close! Upon hearing the outstanding choral music and organ at St, Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church during the days of Paul Reido, organist/choirmaster, I was transformed in that superb acoustical space.
STARTING OUT
Yep, I accompanied everything from choral rehearsals, UIL, school musicals and played the organ in church. My official place to practice was St. Matthews Episcopal (our neighbor was the organist!). The church was never locked and they owned a lovely 1954 Moller pipe organ. I spent many a late night in that quiet place away from the world improvising and playing all my piano pieces. In my senior year, our concert choir performed a jazz mass at St. Matthews Episcopal church and I played my very first Episcopal service there and as I write this I am organist/choirmaster at St. Matthews some 40 years later!
Back in the 60’s, we could get radio station KSL from Salt Lake City…yes, really! I would lay down in front of our Montgomery Ward radio/stereo each Sunday night at 10:30 PM and listen to Dr. Alexander Schreiner at the organ during his weekly live radio broadcasts from the Mormon Tabernacle. I have retained so many of the chord structures contained within his improvisations in my head, and still recall how his lush harmonies could envelope those wonderful tunes with such elegance. I have never heard any organist anywhere who could capture hymn harmonizations like Dr. Schreiner.
COLLEGE...UHH
My first college organ professor at Texas Tech University in Lubbock was determined to “lock” me at the organ until I got serious about organ literature, especially J.S. Bach. We would work two or three measures as if the entire scope of my musical life was built on a subtlety so refined that only the angels would “get it””. I left at the end of the semester!
My Mother had studied with Mary Ruth McCulley (I lovingly refer to her as MRMC) , organist at Polk Street Methodist in downtown Amarillo back in the 50’s. Our little Nazarene church purchased a Hammond organ from Jenkins Music Company and they offered FREE LESSONS, so Mama took organ lessons! Poor MRMC was teaching area “organists” how to play a HAMMOND ELECTRIC ORGAN on a grand pipe organ…using both feet…you do the math!
I transferred to West Texas State University to study with MRMC whom I hold in such high regard - to this very day - that I can hardly speak of her without tears welling up in my eyes. Each lesson was begun with a hymn. She not only taught me perfection, musicality and technical discipline, she showed me how to love people through music! She never said a harsh word about anyone. She was thoroughly dedicated to her students and to this very day, at age 87, she is a beloved friend, spiritual guide and mentor.
"CHURCH WORK"
After graduation, I was offered the position as Organist/Music Associate at First Baptist, Amarillo. We literally took a chain saw and “tore” out a historic 1938 Austin organ to be replaced with a new Reuter ( that was 1975). I remained there for 4½ “almost” blissful years. But, even in those days there were “liturgical rumblings” in my soul. I had been associate organist at St. Andrews Episcopal in Amarillo during my time at WTSU and loved the place and performed my senior recital there on a snowy, frozen panhandle evening. A seed had been planted.
SHOW BIZ
In 1980, I returned to WTSU and Miss McCulley to study organ--only. For a year I did exactly as I wanted, practiced 6 or 7 hours a day and reviewed tons of literature ( I had to wait until I became an Episcopalian to play most of it!).
In 1981 I spent 10 beautiful months as organist at FBC Lawton, Okla. playing a new 52 rank Moller in their new massive Georgian Colonial sanctuary.
Then in February of 1982 I entered the portals of “fundamentalism” as Organist/Music Associate at the infamous First Baptist Church of Dallas. Thirteen and one half years later I finally got out. The experience taught me patience, tenacity and perseverance. I may write a book about it all. We fought demons, led a massive music program with over 1200 regular attendees - 9 full time music staff members, maintained five city blocks of property - 4 pipe organs and 144 pianos - renovated the 100 plus year old sanctuary, took major choir tours to every corner of the world, we endured three different directors and during two very lengthy interim periods between each “transition” we cleaned up the messes they left behind… (OBTW I was slipping away each week to a small Episcopal church in Dallas for Holy Communion, the baptists never suspected a thing.)
Moving right along. I became Dean of the Dallas Chapter of the American Guild of Organists my last year at FBC ( the first Dean was Mrs. J.H. Cassidy, FBC organist/choirmaster and taught organ in the early 1900’s at SMU) and we gave “seed money” to start the remarkable Orpheus Chamber Singers in Dallas. Then I spent three years as Organist/Music Associate at Wilshire Baptist where we renovated the Sanctuary and attached gallery, hosted the Dallas Bach Society, Orpheus Chamber Singers and our own concert series in those remarkable acoustics, as well as resident Arkady Fomin and his highly specialized school (The new Conservatory of Dallas) for beginning string players…I conducted everything (as usual) from the Sanctuary Choir to handbells to youth choir, ad infinitum…and then made my leap out of the Baptist Hymnal for good.
I spent the next couple of years serving as organist and free lance musician, first at Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church and followed by Highland Park UMC (incidentally, during both of those opportunities, each congregation went into massive new building/fund raising programs…no kidding!).
THERE IS HOPE AFTER ALL
Then one day I received a call about an opening at St. John’s Episcopal in Dallas as Organist/Choir Master…my real life was about to begin and was conformed as a bonafide Anglican...finally! After two months there we purchased the 1952 Aeolian-Skinner from the old Julliard School in Manhattan ( down by Riverside Church and Union theological Seminary). It was a marriage made in heaven, combined with the existing 1964 Reuter organ. The old “Skinner” fit in place as if we had designed it! St. John’s holds the high honor of hosting the oldest Episcopal school in Dallas and we renovated the school plant at the same time that the new organ was being “voiced” . I have never seen so much “noisy” transformation take place in any institution in such a short amount of time (they were breaking through solid rock below the church )! The school chapel services were simply astounding. Those kids sang all the great Anglican hymns and they loved full organ on the last stanza - every Friday! Each Sunday, I hated to leave the place and would usually drive around a while just to “come down” . The choir and congregation, that marvelous room and the organ all exposed, magic. God’s mystical magic.
RECENT JOURNEY
The reason for my return to the Texas Panhandle was for the benefit of my aging parents. My father passed last January and he left behind countless memories and profound admiration among everyone who knew him. His genius will forever be a fearless and tireless example to me.
In order to keep up my skills and musical prowess, I have returned to my beloved St. Matthew’s in Pampa and the now landmark St. Andrew’s in Amarillo (with the stunningly rebuilt Aeolian-Skinner from UT Austin following a devastating fire which destroyed the church and Reuter organ in 1992).
My work is not yet complete. I built choral programs when there was no money to buy music. I have “accompanied” an orchestra each week - filling in missing parts and on occasion, drowning out the whole mess! I have installed great pipe organs in spite of wall to wall carpeting. I have led people to God with pure beauty and unwavering prayer. I have seen miracles occur among fractured and burned-out ministries. I have heard God’s people lift their voices in praise, turmoil, passion and great grief. I have seen lives changed through kindness and patience--but most of all it is the joy I receive when I worship through the making of music. A lifetime of music making is all consuming. I never really had a life, period. But, I learned to improvise anything, anywhere, anytime.
Playing great organ literature just simply cannot be described. You have to experience the feel of a slight touch on the keyboard and suddenly having the heavens open and your heart soar and your pulse race... Surely, God inhabits the praises of his people. I hope so! Otherwise He would be deaf! Be at peace...