In 1930, 29-year-old Harry Partch fed a decade of his own classical compositions into a potbelly stove in New Orleans, not out of despair but out of conviction that Western music’s tuning system was a mathematical compromise. This episode traces his life from a 1901 birth in Oakland to missionary parents who had fled the Boxer Rebellion, a childhood in Wild West Benson, Arizona, where his mother sang Mandarin lullabies and he absorbed Yaqui and Spanish folk music, to his early departure from USC and self-education in San Francisco libraries.

The turning point was Helmholtz’s Sensations of Tone, which convinced Partch that equal temperament had detuned the natural overtone series. The episode explains just intonation, his 11-limit system yielding 43 pitches per octave, and the instruments he built to play it, from the adapted viola to the Chromelodeon and his own giant kithara. It follows his years riding the rails during the Depression, the Bitter Music journal, his corporeal music philosophy drawn from Greek theater and Japanese Noh and Kabuki, a stormy tenure at the University of Illinois, and the 1969 Columbia Records LP that finally brought him a wider audience.

• Why the Pythagorean comma forced Western music to adopt equal temperament
• Meetings with W.B. Yeats in Dublin and Kathleen Schlesinger’s reconstructed Greek kithara in London
• Transcribing the speech melodies of hobos and transient workers with a microtonal scale
• Studios in a Wisconsin smithy, a Petaluma chick hatchery, and the Gate 5 shipyard in Sausalito, funded by mail-order records
• How disciples preserved his instruments, how a European ensemble built replicas, and how Paul Simon and the Stooges’ Ron Asheton drew on his work