“There is no music like live music. It’s a transcendent experience,” says Thomas Wright, the new music teacher at Edward R. Murrow HS in Midwood, Brooklyn.

Wright, who previously taught at other schools in his home state of Maryland and in New York, took the job in September, attracted by Murrow’s robust music department.

Murrow students are screened for admittance to the school’s Music Institute, and if accepted, commit to taking two music classes a semester and graduate with a Chancellor’s Arts Endorsed Diploma.

Wright is a lifelong musician — his mother was the guitarist in his childhood church, and he began playing alto sax and singing at an early age. As a student, he benefited from a strong high school music program like Murrow’s.

In addition to teaching beginning, intermediate and advanced piano, Wright directs the gospel choir and is the vocal director for the school musical, “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”

Wright is a friendly extrovert who has been known to recruit students who were merely on their way from one class to the next. “I have a personality,” he admits.

He will stop students in the hallway and ask, “‘Can you sing? Come sing for me!” He’ll get them to sing for him and determine whether they are alto, soprano, tenor or bass. “Then, they just have to rearrange their schedule,” he says cheerfully.

The unorthodox recruitment techniques have paid off. Since September, Wright has nearly doubled the size of the gospel choir and says that his dream is to attract an audience so “large and wonderful that the seats are packed and people are falling off the roof trying to get in.”

He arranged for the Morehouse College Glee Club, the choral group from his alma mater, to perform at Murrow on March 18.

On Sundays, Wright plays the organ and directs the choir at his church. “First there was the Word, and then there was music,” he says. He takes a particular joy in teaching gospel and 20th-century Black composers. He views teaching Black music history as a special duty.

“As an African American, it’s my responsibility to keep my history at the forefront of what I do,” he said. “If I don’t, who will?”

But his musical interests are expansive, and he has a deep curiosity. “I love the Eastern musical traditions with the different scale, the tones,” he said, and he confesses that his favorite music when he’s off the clock is “house music — which is my escape.”

Wright views music not only as a cultural tradition but as an integral part of a functioning society. When students claim not to like music, he asks, “What happens at a wedding or a funeral or a club? When they’re upset, when they’re happy? What is always present? Music.”