Found: Magic of teaching piano

By Pablo Mayo Cerqueiro

Every morning during the summer months, John Spradling has a lazy cup of coffee before he starts giving piano lessons at his studio and home on Court Street. Spradling has been teaching piano since 1971, when he got an assistantship position at Indiana University School of Music. Spradling comes from St. Louis, Mo., but he moved to Syracuse over 15 years ago after having lived in several places, including Austria.

“Music … is something that one should be in if you cannot do without it, and that’s my case,” he said.

Spradling began playing piano before he was 10. However, he says he didn’t realize music was his calling until he was about 12 years old, when he felt something changed inside him as he was playing Chopin’s “Military Polonaise.”

“So, suddenly, practicing becomes a living, learning, joyful experience rather than a task; and it’s been like that since that moment on,” he said.

Despite performing every now and then, Spradling doesn’t consider himself a performer.

“It’s just not the kind of person I am,” he said. “As a young kid like that, you want to go into performing. So, you study, you sweat, you practice thousands of hours, and then you discover at some point, as many of your colleagues discover, that not everybody is going to be that type of performer, and yet, I was left with this tremendous love of music and dedicated my life to it.”

Spradling has found teaching as his way of life.

“I ended up through connections here in Syracuse, specifically, with the goal to set up a teaching studio,” he said. “One of my parameters was that students were to come to the house here.”

Spradling also has a teaching position at a church in Manlius.

Stephen Pikarsky, one of his students, says he’s taken lessons with Spradling since he was 8 years old and that Spradling raised him on classical music. Pikarsky has won numerous competitions, such as the Civic Morning Musicals and the Syracuse Symphony Youth Concerto Competition, which he won twice. With the help of his teacher, he’s now preparing himself for the Hilton Head International Piano Competition, which will be held in North Carolina in March 2014.

“I read music before I read English,” Pikarsky said.