The year 1943 changed the life of Harry Partch (1901 - 1974), the maverick American composer who had literally been a hobo for large parts of the previous few years. He received a Guggenheim Grant, located himself in upstate New York, and resumed composition. Now, he had a few instruments that he had built to play his unique, microtonal just intonation music—which used a scale system with up to 43 notes in the octave.

This led to a concert, given by the League of Composers, in Carnegie Chamber Music Hall on April 22, 1944. It was Partch's first exposure to the New York audience. Elizabeth Luening, wife of the composer Otto Luening, sang one of his vocal pieces, Y. D. Fantasy, and Partch promised to write music for her.

Accordingly, he composed Two Settings, from Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, for her. The songs are for soprano, the kithara (one of the instruments he had invented), and the double flageolet (an instrument invented by Henry Brant). Mrs. Luening sang the first of the two settings, Isobel, at a repeat of the League concert, held at Columbia University on May 22. The other song is Annah the Allmaziful.

In 1945, when Partch was working at the University of Wisconsin, the Two Settings were among the works recorded on 78 rpm acetate discs by Dr. Warren Gilson, an amateur recordist who had built a complete home studio. By which time, Partch had replaced the double flageolet with tin flutes (another Brant invention, with oboe reeds attached to the bodies of the tin flutes).

Partch's own vocal texts are usually whimsical and sometimes nonsensical, and he responded eagerly to Joyce's virtuoso wordplay. His use of tones of strange scale and harmonic structures are a good fit to Joyce's language, which uses the building blocks of English in ways that are outside its rules. Partch's obvious delight in the material is infectious in these unique songs.

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