Library Person
Harry Partch
American composer and instrument builder; the central figure in the 20th-century revival of just intonation.
Harry Partch (1901–1974) began experimenting with just intonation in the mid-1920s and, over the following five decades, developed a 43-tone-per-octave just intonation system alongside a family of original instruments built to play it — becoming the first 20th-century composer to make a sustained commitment to just intonation and the figure most responsible for reviving it as a working musical resource. His treatise Genesis of a Music remains the field’s foundational text.