Premieres of fresh classical music often get heralded in the bigger cities of this country and elsewhere, but even though South Florida might not have that kind of profile, it still gets a reasonable share every season of new pieces.

This afternoon in Coconut Grove, a string quartet will give two performances of a work written especially for its members by a man who grew up in Broward County. Kenneth Fuchs, who now teaches at the University of Connecticut, is a Piper High School graduate who went on to study at the University of Miami and Juilliard, and now enjoys a healthy career as a composer.

His “American” String Quartet (it’s his No. 5), got its world premiere last week from the Delray String Quartet, which commissioned it last season after performing Fuchs’ Fourth Quartet as part of its last season. The foursome — violinists Mei Mei Luo and Tomas Cotik, violist Richard Fleischman and cellist Claudio Jaffe — are based in Palm Beach County’s Delray Beach but have been giving regular performances in Fort Lauderdale and Miami for a couple seasons now.

I caught the world premiere performance last week in Delray Beach and found the new work to be large-visioned and highly accessible, with a style very much in keeping with the great American school of composers who dominated the landscape in the middle of the last century.

“The idea of writing in what we might call an American-sounding voice is something that I really have actively and consciously tried to cultivate, because the biggest influences in my life as a composer are in fact the composers of the American symphonic school,” he said, referring to writers such as Aaron Copland and David Diamond.

Fuchs, 55, held administrative and teaching job at the Manhattan School and the University of Oklahoma as well as UConn, and the new quartet will be recorded next week for a disc devoted to Fuchs’ music on the Naxos label. Pianist Christopher O’Riley, the host of public radio’s “From the Top,” also will be featured on the disc.

The quartet’s 30 minutes are derived from the single theme heard in the first violin at the beginning, a long-breathed, slow melody that gets transformed into a busy theme for the fast section that follows. It’s no accident that Fuchs wanted to develop his piece out of one theme.

“I’ve always loved the Beethoven idea of motivic composition,” he said earlier this month, discussing how he first learned that style in detail during his Juilliard years. “And that conceptual idea of musical composition construction has always stayed with me. It’s something I continue, now in my adult life, to pursue and think about: How can I build a composition out of one motivic idea?”

The quartet, whose outer movements are mostly joyful and athletic, enclose two more anguished movements, one a sardonic march, and the other a wrecked-civilization waltz that gives way to an intense elegy. That elegy is for his country, in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks of 2001. Some of the music is borrowed from another 9/11 piece, a Fuchs vocal work based on Don DeLillo’s “The Falling Man,” itself a reference to a photograph of a man who jumped off the World Trade Center during the assault.

“Like all of us who have experienced life in the last 12 years, I have thought a lot about the events of 9/11 and how that’s shaped our world,” Fuchs said. “Part of the reason I called the work ‘American’ … [is] it is my own meditation on the American experience, the post-9/11 experience.”

The middle two movements are designed as a comment on the way we live today, he said.

“The second and third movements are much more aggressive, and they are really more about contemporary urban angst, in terms of the musical dialogue that’s going on,” he said.

The finale features a wildly forceful fugue theme that ends up building a large head of sonic steam when all four players have taken it up, and the piece ends with a big A major chord. It’s a strong new piece of American music, and if you’re feeling adventurous and interested about what our composers are up to these days, this might be the concert to investigate.

Also on the Delray String Quartet program are the Haydn String Quartet No. 52 (in E-flat, Op. 64, No. 6) and the Schubert “Quartettsatz” (in C minor, D. 703). The concert is set for 4 p.m. today at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Coconut Grove. Tickets are $20. Call 561-213-4138 or visit www.delraystringquartet.com.