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 Ch ...