BACH Research Portal

Original project title: Forschungsportal BACH
Innovative Dokumentation der Lebens- und Wirkungsgeschichte der Musikerfamilie Bach von den Anfängen bis 1810. Feldforschung – Online-Edition – Digitales Archiv

Over a period of 25 years, the „BACH Research Portal“ will for the first time index all the available archive sources on the entire Bach family of musicians in digital form and make them publicly accessible. This will be done using the latest digital humanities methods. This project of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig is based at the Leipzig Bach Archive.

From the family’s progenitor, Veit Bach, to the last composing grandson of Johann Sebastian Bach, and from the 16th to the early 19th century – starting in January 2023, all the surviving documents about the most influential musical dynasty in the history of music will be made available in an innovative digital portal. Be it letters, employment certificates, wage receipts or discussions with contemporaries, for the first time in the history of Bach research the entire body of material that has been handed down and is scattered across libraries, archives and private collections will be compiled, digitally recorded, indexed according to scholarly criteria, annotated, and bundled together for access in an online portal.

The work will make use of the latest digital humanities methods; in particular, automatic text recognition for old manuscripts will be used and continuously developed during the project, while new findings about watermarks and types of paper, as well as writer recognition, may help clearly assign surviving Bach works. The correspondence to be indexed under the project spans all Europe. Besides facsimiles of the original sources, comments and summaries, contextual documents will also be digitally indexed. The „BACH Research Portal“ thus offers academics and an interested public a unique collection of sources about the cultural and social history of the different centuries, ranging, for example, from the living conditions of the town musicians in the 17th and 18th centuries through to the aesthetic discourse of the period of the Enlightenment.