One of the most original American composers of the 20th century, Harry Partch is a hero to fans of the homegrown avant-garde. The term “visionary outsider” may be overworn, but it suits an artist who drew inspiration from hobo life and traditional Asian music, challenged the 12-tone scale with his own 43-tone version, and hand-fashioned a battery of some 30 primary instruments on which to play it. These instruments, whether stringed or percussive, boast a quasi-fantastic sculptural quality, and names redolent of myth: Diamond Marimba, Kithara, the Cloud Chamber Bowls.

Partch, who died in 1974 at the age of 73, left a devoted core of musicians committed to performing his pieces, and not only in concert halls. The singer-songwriter Tom Waits crafted much of his shambling, off-kilter sound from Partch’s ideas. The pop producer Hal Wilner once hired the instruments to deploy on a perverse tribute album to another iconoclast, the jazz composer Charles Mingus.

Even so, the composer’s biggest production — the large-scale musical theater piece “Delusion of the Fury” — has only been staged once, in 1969. The legendary instruments are complicated to move, and the degree of rehearsal and coordination necessary to properly engineer the two-act production is extremely challenging. “It’s very expensive to do,” the conductor and composer Dean Drummond said. Mr. Drummond, who has maintained all of Partch’s one-of-a-kind instruments since 1990, has spent his entire career playing Partch’s music as the leader of Newband, and, more recently, as a professor at Montclair State University in Montclair, N.J., where the instruments have resided since 1999. Mr. Drummond, 58, has been steadily working his way through the Partch canon, presenting each of the late composer’s key pieces in chronological order. Thanks to the Japan Society, which has undertaken the task of staging “Delusion of the Fury” with four performances next week, he got a head start on the piece.

“I always intended to do this piece,” Mr. Drummond said, “but not for another 10 years or so.” The production is a collaboration with the choreographer Dawn Akemi Saito and the theater director John Jesurun. Rather than re-create the original production, this “Fury” aims to more fully develop Partch’s somewhat compromised vision for the piece, which meshes an 11th-century Japanese ghost story and an Ethiopian fable in a dreamlike flux of movement and bewitchingly ethereal music.

“I don’t want to put down the 1969 premiere,” Mr. Drummond, who was among the musicians onstage at the original San Diego performance, said. “Partch was so concerned about the music that he didn’t see what the dance was or the theater was, and had criticized it.”

Enter Mr. Jesurun, who has worked for the past three months to make the dramatic elements as seamless as possible. The MacArthur Grant winner, who is known for more whimsical meta-theatrical, mixed-media productions, might seem to be in strange territory. And that’s what he likes. “Part of the reason I took it was that it was such a challenge,” he said. “I love this music, but how will we work with that? We’re taking very ancient stories and trying to bring them forward and modernize them in a certain way, to make a more relevant aesthetic. But the music helps to carry a lot of things for me. I really am following the desires of the music.” The Japan Society’s production will feature 10 dancers and 24 musicians playing instruments that form a backdrop to the stage — a piece of theater in itself. The Butoh-influenced movement is accompanied by singing and brief dialogue (maybe 10 words total). “There’s a crazy convergence of all these things in this piece,” Mr. Jesurun said. “And it all comes together without giving too much emphasis to any one element. This music seems to have been around since thousands of years ago, and yet it’s totally modern. There’s a sparseness in the use of space that has always been attractive to me, as well as the primal types of stories. Everything floats inside the music.”

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