Felix Kubin amasses a string ensemble, children’s choir, two Polish percussionists, live electronics and film for Falling Still, a new composition premiering in Hamburg on 16 May. Explaining his new work via email, he appears remarkably calm, even as every waking moment is split between plugging holes in his 70 minute composition, and rehearsing players, singers and technicians through its complex network of strings, electronics, spoken word recordings and choral chants. With the clock running down to its Hamburg premiere, he still has to write and supply some final text parts for the boys’ choir.

Commissioned by the Second Hamburg International Music Festival, Falling Still will be performed at Laeiszhalle by Kubin on live electronics, with his brother Max Knoth conducting the strings of Ensemble Resonanz, the Polish percussion team of Miłosz Pękala and Magdalena Kordylasińska-Pękala, Chorknaben Uetersen Boys’ Choir, plus video contributions from Mariola Brillowska and Marie Losier. From its relatively prestigious concert presentation to the far higher numbers of individuals hired in to perform it, the event could be read as raising the cultural stakes for Kubin. “Falling Still is by far the biggest piece I have ever produced,” he admits.

But regardless of the resources he might have at his disposal for his projects, be it a one man synthi song, post NDW pop, a Hörspiel radio work, concrète-like pieces, or his more recent chamber compositions, his music aspires to a condition of flux rather than fixed frameworks of notes. Kubin says that in Falling Still he sees “the utopia of boundless freedom as as an eternal falling process, a complete detachedness that for me also represents loneliness, uncertainty and desire”.

What came first? Was Falling Still an idea from deep inside himself that was crying out to be made and heard, if only he could find the resources necessary to make it? Kubin says it partly draws on his earlier works but he composed most of it from scratch after he was commissioned by the Hamburg International Music Festival. “The overall theme of that festival edition is freedom,” says Kubin, “which I didn't want to approach in the usual political or romantic revolutionary way but rather in a metaphor of constant falling, hence its title Falling Still. For some reason, I immediately thought of a children’s choir singing or rhythmically speaking, which I imagined to be an interesting contrast to the electronic sounds. The choir is the most challenging part of the composition due to its fragile character and the strict rehearsal times.”

His Hörspiel work for German radio in particular taught him how to layer and interweave voices, each questioning the others, enacting a metaphor for the utopia of boundless freedom as an eternal falling process that has animated much of his past music. This time around, he says he “reproduces this ambiguity by means of dream journals and interviews with astronomers, artists and experts of the subconscious mind, blended with a string ensemble, a boys' choir, percussionists and live electronics to create a universal sound.

“I made interviews with diverse people about the topic of falling,” he continues, “among them artists who talk about their experiences with falling, with the astronomer Luboš Kohoutek who discovered the comet Kohoutek in the 1970s and professor Philipp Osten who published a book about somnambulism of the 19th century, with Toshimaru Nakamura who survived an earthquake in a high-rise building and a dentist who hypnotises some of his patients in his medical practice.”

Those old enough to remember Deep Purple’s 1969 LP Concerto For Group And Orchestra can’t help but recoil at first from the notion of integrating popular music and classical or modern composition. That failure of communication between the supposedly higher cultural form of classical music and lower popular culture form was even compounded by Ornette Coleman’s Skies Of America, on which orchestra and Ornette’s group might as well have been playing on different planets. In the decades between, disparate music cultures no longer appear to be so far apart. What’s Kubin take?

“Until the beginning of 2000, the academic music scene had been in a crisis, stuck in a corner of ‘difficult music written for insiders’,” he responds. "This has totally changed. There is so much happening. For example, in Berlin you can see a blossoming culture of echtzeit musik, there's people with completely different backgrounds playing in many constellations. Recently I was invited to contribute to Labor Sonor's Translating Music festival, a brilliant experience! Musicians were asked to translate other artists' music, no matter which genre, in their own sound – but with a truly experimental mindset. This scene is like a huge intelligent amoeba. It’s understood that skills can not only be judged by piano lessons and classical education. It’s great to see a growing mutual interest of diverse scenes: pop, club, improvised, classical music and art.

“I recently thought that my general profession is probably to combine disparate elements,” he continues. “The German word for profession is beruf which is close to berufung (calling). It’s a long distance call, I guess! I was always interested in pop AND contemporary experimental music, in dilettante strategies AND academic dramaturgy, club AND concert hall, high AND low culture. These are all parts of life and they all have their different rules and rituals. I can enjoy them all, and it's interesting to present them in ‘wrong’ contexts. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I grew up in a divided country. I like contradictions and don’t think they always have to be harmonised. The world is a dissonant place. As long as the sparks jumping from one end to the other are good ideas and not rockets, they are welcome.” Falling Still premiers at the second Hamburg International Music Festival on 16 May. Kubin is set to return to the stage in Hamburg the following month – he plays the Blurred Edges festival on 16 June.