Bacon finished his education at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a master's degree for the composition of The Song of the Preacher in 1935.
He met his fourth wife Ellen Wendt, a soprano singer, when he was 70 and she was 26 at 10,000 feet on a Sierra Club trip in Kings Canyon National Park in 1968, four years after he retired from Syracuse University.
[4] At the age of 19, Bacon wrote a complex treatise entitled "Our Musical Idiom," [5] which explored all possible harmonies within Equal Temperament and gave the numbers of chords available for each cardinality (thereby anticipating the later work of Allen Forte).
Experiencing the depression of post-war Europe first hand, he understood that the avant-garde movement reflected the pessimism of its origins.
He composed a large number of art songs, and much other music including chamber, orchestral, and choral works.
In 1928 Bacon traveled from New York to California to take up a position at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music where he served until 1930.
A year later he was supervising the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Music Project and conducting the San Francisco Symphony.
[6][7] Bacon composed settings to the works by the following: Matthew Arnold, William Blake, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Witter Bynner, Robert Burns, Helena Carus, Emily Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Paul Horgan, A. E. Housman, Nicolaus Lenau, Cornel Lengyel, Herman Melville, Carl Sandberg, William Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sara Teasdale, Walt Whitman.