When he was eighteen, Ray Reussner walked through a music store that was playing a recording by Andrés Segovia. He was stopped by the beauty of the guitar being played in a way he had never heard before. He returned the next day and bought his first classical guitar. Weeks later, he enrolled at the Kansas City Conservatory of Music. Months later, only nineteen years old, with a few words of Spanish and the address of a guitar maker in Madrid, the young Reussner set out for the Iberian Peninsula. He had been told that a Spaniard, José Tomás, was one of the world's finest guitar teachers. He found Tomás assisting Segovia at his summer Master Classes in Santiago, Spain, and spent the next year and a half under his guidance.

The following summer, he was selected to participate in master classes directly under Andrés Segovia. Over the years, he performed in five Segovia classses and was chosen to be one of the subjects of a PBS documentary about the 1965 Segovia Master Class. He was then chosen to be one of six students to study with John Williams at the Royal College of Music in London and won the Jack Morrison Guitar Prize, awarded to the top student. He then attracted international notice by winning the prestigious Premio Guitarras Ramirez and the Premio American Guitar Foundation in the Concurso International de Guitarra at Orense, Spain.

After returning to the United States, he was asked ( at the age of 22) to join the faculty of the Kansas City Conservatory of Music and later he joined the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he taught for seven years. He performed in concert all across America, including the Lincoln Center in New York, to great critical acclaim. And then...he ceased performing publicly.

With his wife, Sylvia, and son, Christopher, he moved to Southern Oregon, built his house by hand, and practiced in solitude for nearly a decade. Now Ray Reussner has resumed his concert career and his music has brought him standing ovations once again.