Harry Partch is unique among 20th century American composers in his disavowal of Western music forms and tunings.
He deveoped his own tuning methods by dividing the generic octave of twelve tones into a system that featured forty-three scale tones.
A virtual recluse in his younger years, Partch traveled the American landscape during the Great Depression years and developed a series of works that spoke to the conditions that prevailed in rural America at that time.

Harry Partch was born in Oakland, California as son of missionary parents on 24 June 1901. Largely self-taught, he enhanced his skills as instrument maker and developed during the 1920s and 1930s his own theory of music. Taking his authority from the Greeks, he argued for music as a corporeal rather than an intellectual art. He used the natural intervals of just intonation and built his own percussion and wind instruments for this purpose in a 43-note scale.



His own major works were dramatic, their drama enhanced by the striking presence of his instruments. Largely ignored by standard musical institutions, he criticised concert traditions, the roles of performer and composer, the role of music in society, the twelve-tone equal-temperament scale and the concept of pure or abstract music. To explain his ideas, he wrote "Genesis of a music".

Between 1930 and 1972, Partch, who held no teaching appointments, but had research posts at the universities of Wisconsin, Illinois, and California, created music dramas, dance theatre, vocal music and chamber music - mostly performed on instruments he built himself.





His compositions combine American folklore, African and Oriental literature, and mystical and pre-Christian magical thoughts, laced with parody, satire, studied naivety, and irony. His works received wide attention only late in his life, largely as a result of a performance of Delusion of the Fury in 1969.

The influence of his music, however, on other composers has been profound and unabating, as is evident in the works of composers experimenting with just intonation, in mixed-media works since the 1960s, and in the percussive motor-rhythmic music of the minimalists.
Harry Partch died in San Diego on 3 September 1974.