Cellist, composer and visual artist Michael Bach, also known as Michael Bach Bachtischa, was born in Worms, Germany, April 17, 1958. He studied cello with Pierre Fournier and Janos Starker, then embarked on a career of international concert activity as well as performances on radio, recordings, and television. He made numerous significant contributions to the art of contemporary cello performance; his publication Fingerboards & Overtones proposes new ideas concerning overtones and harmonics and is considered a pioneering work in the literature on contemporary technique. In 1990 he developed the Curved Bow (BACH.Bogen) for the cello, violin, and viola, which, in polyphonic playing, permits the simultaneous sounding of multiple strings, with the high arch of the bow allowing for full, sustained chords. Rostropovich has been intimately involved in its development, and several contemporary composers, among them Cage, Schnebel, and Walter Zimmermann, have composed works especially for it. Bach is also a composer, often in collaboration with the visual artist Renate Hoffleit, with whom he has created strikingly original string and sound installations. His purely musical compositions are idiosyncratic and highly personal, described by him as “free from compositional conventions.”  His visual works include Fingerboards I, II (both 1990), and II-VII (1994-98), which capture the hand’s choreography on the cello fingerboard as color impressions, Fieldwork (1994), Mit diesen beiden Händen (1994), Lagauche (1995), and Olévano (1995). 
(Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Centennial Edition 2001)

Excerpts from the music of Michael Bach:

Mit diesen Händen (1992) by Dieter Schnebel
Michael Bach, Cello and Curved Bow; Mechthild Seitz, mezzo-soprano
From The Art of the Curved Bow, Vol. 1, mode 52
+MURBACH for cello solo by Michael Bach Bachtischa
Michael Bach, Cello and Curved Bow
Sarabande in D major by Johann Sebastian Bach
Michael Bach, Cello and Curved Bow