The New Bach Edition is an Urtext edition offering the world of scholarship a reliable musical text which is equally useful in performance. Prepared with the most exacting methods of source criticism, it has set new standards for modern scholarly-critical editions in the latter half of the 20th century. Work on the New Bach Edition led to the rediscovery of lost compositions and resolved many questions of authenticity in the Bach canon. Most of all, however, the close study of the sources has occasioned a large-scale revision of the chronology of Bach's life, thereby forming the basis for a new image of the composer in our time.

In each series, the volumes not only contain those works by Bach which have survived intact but also those existing as fragments. In addition to a preface, each musical volume presents a selection of the relevant sources in facsimile. It is also accompanied by a separately published critical report.