Music
At PS 8 since 2011
Warren Bloom has been teaching music since 2002. In the late 1990s, he returned to New York City after earning a Master’s degree in record production at the University of Miami and, between working in studios in Manhattan, was hired as a musical director in the theater department at the Usdan Center for the Creative and Performing Arts in Huntington. On the first day that summer, he “fell in love with working with kids” and made his way to Hunter College’s music education program. After three years teaching band and orchestra at Talent Unlimited High School, an arts magnet school in Manhattan which draws on students from all five boroughs, Mr. Bloom took time off from full-time teaching and found himself subbing often at PS 8, where he felt a real connection with the school and its strong community. He’s thrilled to be returning several years later, this time as part of that community. (Some of the 5th-graders even remember him!)
Mr. Bloom most enjoys the moment when struggling singers “lock in” with someone else and realize the sounds they can make. “That moment of discovery is great for me every time it happens,” he says.
Mr. Bloom played music (trumpet, piano and trombone) growing up in East Meadow and Syosset. At Brandeis University, he was a “theory-heavy” music major (“with a double minor in legal studies and pinball”) and, after graduating, sang in and directed the Hyannis Sound, a summer season a-cappella group still going strong after 16 years.
When he’s not leading the PS 8 Music Program, Mr. Bloom is assembling a rock orchestra (to perform arrangements he wrote while subbing here and at PS 29 and PS 58), blogging about NBC’s “The Sing-Off” for the Contemporary A Cappella Society, and likely playing twenty games of Scrabble online at once.
