He began his teaching career at The Thacher School from 1977 to 1980 before moving to the University of Puget Sound where he taught from 1980 to 2018.
[1] Block began his writing career with several articles based on his dissertation on the compositional process of Beethoven’s Piano Concertos No.
[3] In the second edition (2009) Block expanded the title to include "and Lloyd Webber" and added two new chapters on musical film adaptations.
This work led to his most recent book, A Fine Romance: Adapting Broadway to Hollywood in the Studio System Era (2023), in which Block explores the symbiotic relationship between a dozen Broadway musicals and their Hollywood studio film adaptations from the late 1920s to the early 1970s.
Since 2010, he has been the series editor of Oxford’s Broadway Legacies, which includes volumes on composers, librettists, lyricists, directors, choreographers, and individual musicals.