ABSTRACT
Johann Sebastian Bach spent almost half of his life at schools, first as a schoolboy in a number of central and north German cities and then, from 1723 until the end of his life, as a teacher at the Thomas School in Leipzig. Even between these two framing periods, he collaborated with boys’ choirs and music teachers at local schools in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen. Only during the fifteen years at the courts in Weimar and Cöthen (1708-1723), Bach was without a position that was directly linked to an institution of learning. But even in Weimar, cantor Georg Theodor Reineccius supplied boys from the school to sing with the court chapel musicians.1
