In 1703 he returned to Thuringia, working as a musician for Protestant churches in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen, and for longer periods at courts in Weimar, where he expanded his organ repertory, and Köthen, where he was mostly engaged with chamber music.

Bach enriched established German styles through his mastery of counterpoint, harmonic and motivic organisation,[3] and his adaptation of rhythms, forms, and textures from abroad, particularly Italy and France.

Dissemination of scholarship on the composer continued through periodicals (and later also websites) exclusively devoted to him and other publications such as the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV, a numbered catalogue of his works) and new critical editions of his compositions.

His music was further popularised through a multitude of arrangements, including the Air on the G String and "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring", and of recordings such as three different box sets with complete performances of his oeuvre marking the 250th anniversary of his death.

[22] In January 1703, shortly after graduating from St. Michael's and being turned down for the post of organist at Sangerhausen,[23] Bach was appointed court musician in the chapel of Duke Johann Ernst III in Weimar.

[25] On 14 August 1703, he became the organist at the New Church,[10] with light duties, a relatively generous salary, and a new organ tuned in a temperament that allowed music written in a wider range of keys to be played.

[21] Bach left Mühlhausen in 1708, returning to Weimar this time as organist and from 1714 Konzertmeister (director of music) at the ducal court, where he could work with a large, well-funded contingent of professional musicians.

In 1713, Bach was offered a post in Halle when he advised the authorities during a renovation by Christoph Cuntzius of the main organ in the west gallery of the Market Church of Our Dear Lady.

In the words of Christoph Wolff, assuming the directorship was a shrewd move that "consolidated Bach's firm grip on Leipzig's principal musical institutions".

[68] Every week, the Collegium Musicum gave two-hour performances, in winter at the Café Zimmermann, a coffeehouse on Catherine Street off the main market square, and in summer in the proprietor's outdoor coffee garden just outside the town walls, near the East Gate.

Bach also wrote the obituary ("Nekrolog"), which was published in Mizler's Musikalische Bibliothek [de], a periodical journal produced by the Society of Musical Sciences, in 1754.

[102] Like his contemporaries Handel, Telemann, and Vivaldi, Bach composed concertos, suites, recitatives, da capo arias, and four-part choral music, and employed basso continuo.

[citation needed] The large-scale structure of every major Bach sacred vocal work is evidence of subtle, elaborate planning to create religiously and musically powerful expression.

[107] Bach published or carefully compiled in manuscript many collections of pieces that explored the range of artistic and technical possibilities inherent in almost every genre of his time except opera.

For example, The Well-Tempered Clavier comprises two books, each of which presents a prelude and fugue in every major and minor key, displaying a dizzying variety of structural, contrapuntal and fugal techniques.

[109] The new system was at the core of Bach's style, and his compositions are to a large extent considered to have laid down the rules for the evolving scheme that dominated musical expression in the next centuries.

[120] In concerted playing in Bach's time, the basso continuo, consisting of instruments such as organ, viola da gamba, or harpsichord, usually had the role of accompaniment, providing a piece's harmonic and rhythmic foundation.

[127] These strictly contrapuntal compositions, and most of Bach's music in general, are characterised by distinct melodic lines for each voice, where the chords formed by the notes sounding at a given point follow the rules of four-part harmony.

[21] Bach also wrote secular cantatas, for instance for members of the royal Polish and prince-electoral Saxonian families (e.g. Trauer-Ode),[148] or other public or private occasions (e.g.

A decidedly North German influence was exerted by Georg Böhm, with whom Bach came into contact in Lüneburg, and Dieterich Buxtehude, whom the young organist visited in Lübeck in 1704 on an extended leave of absence from his job in Arnstadt.

Around this time, Bach copied the works of numerous French and Italian composers to gain insights into their compositional languages and later arranged violin concertos by Vivaldi and others for organ and harpsichord.

[161][162] The Canonic Variations on "Vom Himmel hoch da komm' ich her" and the Schübler Chorales are organ works Bach published in the last years of his life.

Bach's best-known orchestral works are the Brandenburg Concertos, so named because he submitted them in the hope of gaining employment from Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg-Schwedt in 1721; his application was unsuccessful.

[176] In 1950, the design of the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis was to keep such works out of the main catalogue: if there was a strong association with Bach they could be listed in its appendix (German: Anhang, abbreviated as Anh.).

In his own time, Bach was highly regarded by his colleagues,[178] but his reputation outside this small circle of connoisseurs was due not to his compositions (which had an extremely narrow circulation),[10] but to his virtuosic abilities.

Nevertheless, during his life, Bach received public recognition, such as the title of court composer by Augustus III of Poland and the appreciation he was shown by Frederick the Great and Hermann Karl von Keyserling.

The early devotees were not all musicians; for example, in Berlin, Daniel Itzig, a high official of Frederick the Great's court, venerated Bach.

[214] Several 20th-century composers referred to Bach or his music, for example Eugène Ysaÿe in Six Sonatas for solo violin, Dmitri Shostakovich in 24 Preludes and Fugues, and Heitor Villa-Lobos in Bachianas Brasileiras.

[n 5] In 2015, Bach's handwritten personal copy of the Mass in B minor, held by the Berlin State Library, was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register,[224] a program intended to protect culturally significant manuscripts.

His most exalted sacred works—the two extant Passions, from the seventeen-twenties, and the Mass in B Minor, completed not long before his death in 1750—are feats of synthesis, mobilizing secular devices to spiritual ends.