Harry Partch was a hands-on composer. When he had no access to his unique 43-tone instruments, he could not compose. In 1948, after a seven-year sojourn outside California, he moved into an abandoned smithy on his friend Gunnar Johansen's ranch property near Gualala, California. Partch was able to use it as a home and a studio. The result was an immediate creative phase, after several years of no musical production (consumed partly in finishing and publishing his treatise Genesis of a Music). Partch stayed in Gualala for two and a half years, close to the longest time he spent in one residence in his life.

The two works he set out to write in 1949 look both backwards and forwards. Eleven Intrusions continues a line of vocal works with adapted viola that he had been writing since 1930. Ring Around the Moon, in contrast, began as an abstract instrumental piece.

Partch first named it Tonality Flux. This was his term for a series of chords that resolve into each other by motion of their voices across especially narrow intervals, but without establishing a tonal direction. The idea for the piece most likely started with some exercises Partch had written six years earlier for his chromelodeon, (a microtonal reed organ) to study chord progressions in his system within one octave.

At any event, nothing of Tonality Flux survived. When Partch came back to the idea, he called the work in progress Sonata Dementia. Its three movements were Abstraction and Delusion, Scherzo Schizophrenia, and Allegro Paranoia. He made a recording of it in 1950.

By then, Partch was becoming dissatisfied with the chromelodeon as a performing instrument, though he valued it as an instrument on which he could work out his harmonies. He began building percussion instruments, then turned to work on his first major theater piece, King Oedipus.

After setting that tragedy, Partch turned to much lighter music as a relief, writing three separate pieces: the purely instrumental Castor and Pollux, Ring Around the Moon, and Even Wild Horses, which he collectively titled Plectra and Percussion Dances.

Ring Around the Moon is a reworking of Sonata Dementia for Partch's new ensemble of adapted guitar II, kithara, harmonic canon, chromelodeon I, chromelodeon sub-bass, cloud chamber bowls, 9/8 eroica, diamond marimba, and bass marimba. In addition, the instrumentalists have a series of short vocal parts, usually nonsense such as "mumbo-jumbo, hoity-toity, hotsy-totsy.... " Partch's description of it makes it clear that it is a satire on just about everything.

It is pure silliness, its only coherence the consistency of its incoherence. It starts with densely packed dissonant tonality flux chord sequences. Partch experiments throughout with the combinations his new instruments made possible. At the end, the piece aurally dives for cover (sudden glissandos), when one player yells, for no reason, "Look out! He's got a gun!" The listener might shake his head at the mess this piece is, but then realize he has been well entertained.

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