By Jonathan Blumhofer

When it comes to defining American music, Pacifica Quartet’s new recording offers some welcome food for thought.

The question of what makes music specifically American is an old one that’s never fully been answered, and the Pacifica Quartet’s new recording, American Voices, certainly doesn’t presume to settle the argument. Still, while their opener of Antonin Dvorak’s “American” String Quartet might seem safe and predictable, the directions that the group’s remaining selections take provide some welcome food for thought.

Dvorak’s 1893 chestnut, composed while he was summering in Iowa and first heard in Boston the next year, draws on various influences, from bird song to Black spirituals, framing them within the tradition and structure of the Central European genre. On the surface, it’s a neat trick of musical assimilation, not unlike what Samuel Coleridge-Taylor later managed in his 24 Negro Folk Melodies (though the Melodies stick more closely to their source materials). Indeed, that Dvorak was making a point about what he thought comprised “real” American music was hard to miss: a few months before composing the Quartet, he told the New York Herald that “the future music in this country must be founded upon what are called Negro melodies.”

Not everyone agreed. Amy Beach, for one, offered that “we of the North should be far more likely to be influenced by the old English, Scotch, or Irish songs inherited … from our ancestors.” She went on to write her Gaelic Symphony based on some of those very themes. But Dvorak’s notion has been widely vindicated, especially in the popular music and jazz of the 20th century.

Neither of those latter genres turn up in Florence Price’s two-movement String Quartet in G that follows the “American” on this disc. In fact, there are no direct folk music quotations in the work, though one can clearly hear how its syncopated figures and freely spinning melodic lines owe a debt or two to traditional sources.

Price’s effort, in fact, doesn’t sound or feel too far removed from Dvorak’s idiom (a fact that’s even more true of her symphonic music). Louis Gruenberg’s Four Diversions, on the other hand, calls to mind something George Gershwin might have written in collaboration with his tennis partner, Arnold Schoenberg, had the younger man been granted more years. Wry, epigrammatic, constantly scurrying about, the Diversions seem to be constantly searching and never able to settle down — not unlike many Americans, past and present.

For its part, James Lee III’s Pitch In offers a greater sense of musical and thematic stability. Setting a poem by Sylvia Dianne Beverly and drawing on topics of social justice and food insecurity, its texts are topical and timely. The musical language marries the diatonicism of Dvorak and Price with the acerbic dissonances and, sometimes, sheer energy of the Gruenberg.

While one can hardly scoff at its — or Lee’s — sincerity, the score lacks the musical immediacy of the three selections that precede it. Part of the issue surely lies with the chosen text. For instance, the refrain “People are hungry, yet people continue to waste food” is hardly an unforgettable lyric. More than that, it needs better than a unison, syllabic setting to take flight. Similarly, the quartet writing suffers from an overabundance of ideas, only a couple of which — particularly a driving episode about three-quarters of the way through — really capture the ear.

Regardless, this premiere recording of Pitch In is vigorously and sensitively dispatched. The Pacifica imbue their lines in it with the same focus and clarity they bring to the Dvorak, Price, and Gruenberg offerings, which is to say their playing is stylish and precise. The children’s choir Uniting Voices deliver their part with winning blend, excellent intonation, and crisp diction. Even if the score doesn’t exceed the sum of its parts, it firmly engages with and responds to the world in which we live — just like so many of those “Negro melodies” Dvorak so admired continue to do.

Jonathan Blumhofer is a composer and violist who has been active in the greater Boston area since 2004. His music has received numerous awards and been performed by various ensembles, including the American Composers Orchestra, Kiev Philharmonic, Camerata Chicago, Xanthos Ensemble, and Juventas New Music Group. Since receiving his doctorate from Boston University in 2010, Jon has taught at Clark University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and online for the University of Phoenix, in addition to writing music criticism for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.