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Bach’s musical language, like that of his contemporaries across Europe, was deeply shaped by dance and music for dancing. Though Bach’s Lutheranism limited his participation in social dancing, he nevertheless composed hundreds of named dances and hundreds of works in multiple idioms constructed on dance models. This graduate seminar will explore the histories of the Baroque dance forms Bach inherited with an eye to how the composer incorporated them into his musical language and, in many cases, transformed them. We will consider Bach’s music and writings alongside relevant primary sources and modern scholarship to ask how the musical and cultural conventions of dance music helped shape the composer’s contributions to musical culture.