By GISELA WILLIAMS


Leipzig, Germany, doesn’t call itself the City of Music for nothing.

But when the city’s tourism office uses that title, it is referring to the grand past, when Leipzig nurtured the likes of Johann Sebastian Bach , Mendelssohn and Robert and Clara Schumann, whose house is now a museum.

This year is the 325th anniversary of Bach’s birth, and Leipzig is celebrating with concerts, festivals and the reopening of the newly designed Bach Museum.

But if he were living in Leipzig today, Bach might be composing experimental electronic dance music.

In the last two years, this city of about half a million residents - many of them students at the 600-year-old University of Leipzig - is where some of the most innovative house and techno music is being created.

“The music scene here is as good as those in other, bigger cities like Cologne or Berlin, but everyone knows each other. It’s not commercial,” said Matthias Puppe, the founder of Pop Up Leipzig, an annual alternative music trade fair and festival.

But the city’s affinity for the arts goes well beyond music. “Leipzig is a town of students, musicians and artists,” said Gerd Harry Lybke, the owner of Eigen + Art, one of the most influential galleries in Germany . Mr. Lybke is often credited with placing Leipzig on the global art scene about 10 years ago by promoting the now much-hyped New Leipzig School.

This year, Neo Rauch, the “father” of this group of neo-realistic painters and considered one of Germany’s greatest living artists, is being feted with parallel exhibitions: one at Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and a retrospective at the Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts, both through August 15.

Mr. Lybke compared Leipzig to Berlin in the early 1990s.

“In Leipzig, you can wake up one morning and decide, ‘I’m an artist,’ or the next day say, ‘I think I want to be a journalist,’ ” he said.

This palpable sense that anything is possible is due partly to the city’s cheap rents: grand turn-of-the-century, 184-square-meter , one-bedroom flats go for as little as 300 euros a month .

But only in recent years has Leipzig become desirable . A few decades ago, it was a polluted, soot-covered town known mostly for its book publishing industry and the trade fairs that have been held there since the Middle Ages.

Now the surplus of abandoned factory buildings, which had produced textiles and mechanical parts for products like watches and cars, is a boon, attracting creative entrepreneurs, artists and musicians who have reclaimed the old spaces.

“There’s an underground party or event in an abandoned factory or building every weekend,” Mr. Puppe said.

Even in Leipzig’s beautifully restored small historic center, a few buildings with boarded-up or broken windows remain.

Perhaps the city’s most successful example of an old factory reinvented by artists is the Spinnerei, a cultural complex in a former cotton-spinning mill. The sprawling collection of brick buildings is now home to a cafe, a quirky new pension called the Meisterzimmer, artists’ studios and 11 galleries.

Ksenia Galiaeva, a Russian photographer, and the Japanese artist duo Mai Yamashita and Naoto Kobayashi said that during their months as artists in residence they explored some of the city’s many green spaces.

Despite Leipzig’s industrial history, approximately a third of the city’s landscape is parks and gardens, the largest being the Auenwald, about 35 square kilometers in the heart of town.

“One of the things that makes Leipzig so unique is that it has seamlessly wedded nature with a vital art scene,” wrote the American artist Kylie Manning, in an e-mail message. “Canals and parks weave through abandoned buildings and cafes playing live music,” continued Ms. Manning. “It is both haunting and stimulating.”