Since 1928 Partch had experimented in adapting a viola to play gliding microtonal lines and harmonies, and by 1930 his success had given him sufficient confidence to turn his back upon traditional instruments and musical concepts and to embark upon a 40-year odyssey that would issue ultimately in a new and grandly substantiated aesthetic, an ensemble of some 30 unique instruments, and a body of work—including several large theater pieces—characterized by a piquantly potent, sophisticated primitivism. The initial impetus toward microtones came from an urge as old as Homeric minstrelsy (chanted, by the way, with pitch glides): the creation of a heightened speech "impressing the intangible beauty of tone into the vital power of the spoken word, without impairing either."

What was to become the Seventeen Lyrics of Li Po was begun in the fall of 1930 in New Orleans, where Partch had taken a stint as proofreader for the Times-Picayune. Turning to The Works of Li Po the Chinese Poet Done into English Verse by Shigeyoshi Obata—which had already prompted settings by Bliss and Lambert—Partch began his first extended essay in microtonally inflected bardic intonation with The Long-Departed Lover in December, adding three more settings by April 1931. Partch called them "tone declamations." By September 1933, the number had grown to the canonical 17, though Partch continued to revise and re-notate them as his ability to capture his aural imaginings became more refined. Recensions of the entire set were made over 1944-1945 and again in 1962. Though he drew impetus from such things as Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire (1912) or the Walton-Sitwell Façade (1921)—both mentioned in passing but approvingly in Partch's Genesis of a Music—his Lyrics of Li Po are distinguished by their rhythmic fluidity and mantic scrutiny which mimic and enlarge the gestures of speech into a hovering between speech and song. The Intruder plays off microtonal inflections against passages in the Dorian mode to amplify Li Po's already elusive poetry with great subtlety. By the summer of 1931, Partch was in San Francisco where he met and worked closely with soprano Rudolphine Radil, rehearsing the Li Po lyrics, performing them privately and at a concert for Henry Cowell's New Music Society on February 9, 1932.

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