Neumeister Collection

When the manuscript was rediscovered at Yale University in the 1980s it appeared to contain 31 previously unknown early chorale settings by Johann Sebastian Bach, which were added to the BWV catalogue as Nos.

[1] There the Neumeister volume lay as manuscript LM 4708 until it was rediscovered "early in 1984" by musicologists Christoph Wolff (Harvard), Hans-Joachim Schulze (Bach-Archiv Leipzig), and librarian Harold E. Samuel (Yale).

[6] Their conclusions were confirmed in January 1985 by German organist Wilhelm Krumbach [de] (1937–2005), who had been working on the same material independently, and with a fatal lack of urgency, since 1981.

[12] The rediscovery of the Neumeister Collection quadrupled the number of keyboard works indisputably written by Johann Michael Bach, from eight to thirty-two, with six more arguably also his.

[135] Of the twenty-five pieces attributed to him in the manuscript, seven were known but had been credited to other composers and eighteen were entirely new, making this the largest single trove of his work.

[citation needed] Five of them were already known from other sources: The other thirty-three were partly or wholly new: The Arnstädter Chorales are considered on stylistic grounds to be early works, probably dating from 1703 to 1707, when Bach was active at Arnstadt, and possibly even earlier.

[145] The 2018 last two volumes of Breitkopf & Härtel (B&H)'s new Urtext edition of Bach's organ works included them in alphabetical order, that is, together with other chorale preludes transmitted independently of the collections collated by the composer.