Richard Fountain serves as Dean and Professor of Piano in the School of Creative Arts at Wayland Baptist University in Plainview, TX, where he provides academic and strategic leadership in the areas of music, art, media, and communications. Fountain teaches entrepreneurship, applied and collaborative piano, and piano pedagogy in both traditional and online formats, and also serves as Wayland’s official institutional representative to the National Association of Schools of Music. As a performer he has enjoyed a varied career as soloist, orchestral pianist, collaborator, and chamber musician.
Fountain is one of very few pianists to perform the complete cycle of Franz Liszt’s monumental transcriptions of Beethoven’s nine symphonies. His solo and concerto repertoire highlights American music from all eras, and he is also devoted to the poetic and religious music of Liszt.
Fountain holds the positions of Principal Keyboard with Lincoln’s Symphony Orchestra and the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra. His major teachers and mentors include David Gerard, Leon Harshenin, Paul Barnes, Malcolm Bilson, and Luiz de Moura Castro. He holds a BM from Taylor University, MM and DMA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and an MBA from Wayland Baptist University.
Fountain is Immediate Past President of the Texas Music Teachers Association, serves on the U.S. State Department’s Fulbright Specialist Roster, and was inducted into the Steinway & Sons Teacher Hall of Fame in 2021. He has received numerous awards for professional activities, teaching, and service from the Lubbock Music Teachers Association, the Nebraska Alumni Association, and from his colleagues at Wayland. He has been named as the 2024 MTNA Fellow for the state of Texas.
Fountain is an enthusiastic traveler, having traveled to forty-five of the fifty United States and eleven other countries. He particularly loves long road trips on the open highways of America, and possesses a strangely comprehensive knowledge of the U.S. Interstate Highway system.
