Second Son of Heinrich Bach (1615-1692). Uncle and later father-in-law to Johann Sebastian Bach. Organist, composer, instrument maker and parish clerk in the town of Gehren, near Arnstadt.
from Philipp Spitta's biography of J.S. Bach:The early life of his younger brother, Michael, was passed, we may be sure, exactly like that of the elder (Johann Christoph); he enjoyed the advantage of his father's teaching, and, when he was qualified, assisted him in his duties.
In 1673 the place of Organist at Gehren, near Arnstadt, became vacant. Johann Effler, who had been intrusted with it till then - and who must have been highly efficient, for the great efforts were made to keep him - withdrew in order to take the place of Organist for the Prediger-Kirche at Erfurt, vacated by the death of Johann Bach. Michael passed his examination as organist of October 5, and so satisfied the minister and the town-commissioners that they expressed their special thanks to His Highness the Count for providing the community and the church with a quiet, modest, and experienced artist. At the same time he was made parish-clerk, and received for that office a yearly stipend of ten gülden. His whole income he himself states in 1686 at seventy-two gülden, with eighteen cords of wood, five measure of corn, nine measure of barley, with leave to brew three and a half barrels of beer, and a few other trifles in kind, a piece of pasture land, and free residence. The house in which he dwelt is still standing, and is the deacon's residence.
Besides fulfilling his duties and his occupations as a composer, he found spare time in which to devote himself to consulting instruments; in this he was the precursor and perhaps the instructor of his nephew Nikolaus. We find him in November, 1686, engaged in constructing several clavichords for privy-councillor Wentzing, of Arnstadt, and a violin of his making was, at the beginning of this century, in the posession of the geometrician Schneider, of Gehren; it was given by him to Albert Methfessel, who, himself a Thuringian, at that time was residing at Rudolstadt. (I have this on verbal but quite trustworthy testimony. What became of this violin after Methfessel's death, in 1869, I do not know.)
As his brother Christoph had married the elder daughter of the town-clerk Wedemann, it was perfectly natural, from the Bach point of view, that Michael should choose Katharina, the younger. She gave him her hand on the third day of Christmastide, 1675, and in the course of eighteen years of married life brought him five daughters, the youngest of whom became the first wife of Sebastian Bach, and one son named Gottfried, born March 20, 1690, for whom his father selected his first cousin, the town-musician Joh. Christoph Bach, of Arnstadt, to be godfather. But the boy died in the following year, and the father, too, was snatched away in the flower of his manhood by an early death, in May, 1694.