information:highlighting, quality:correction, information:extraction, linguistic:voice_change, stylistic:tone
21st century

In the 21st century, Bach's compositions have become available online, for instance at the International Music Score Library Project. High-resolution facsimiles of Bach's autographs became available at the Bach Digital website. 21st-century biographers include Christoph Wolff, Peter Williams and John Eliot Gardiner.

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, a program intended to protect culturally significant manuscripts.

Alex Ross writes that "Bach became an absolute master of his art by never ceasing to be a student of it. 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, mobilising secular devices to spiritual ends. They are rooted in archaic chants, hymns, and chorales. They honour, with consummate skill, the scholastic discipline of canon and fugue. They make expert use of the word-painting techniques of the Renaissance madrigal and Baroque opera. They absorb such stock scenes as the lament, the pastoral, the lullaby, the rage aria, the tempest. They allude to courtly French dances, Italian love songs, the polonaise. Their furious development of brief motifs anticipates Beethoven, who worshipped Bach when he was young. And their most daring harmonic adventures—for example, the otherworldly modulations in the 'Confiteor' of the B-Minor Mass—look ahead to Wagner, even to Schoenberg."

In 2019, Bach was named the greatest composer of all time in a poll conducted among 174 living composers.

The liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church remembers Bach annually with a feast day on 28 July; on the same day, the Calendar of Saints of some Lutheran churches, such as the ELCA, remembers Bach and Handel with Heinrich Schütz.