Peter,
   These are, of course questions associated with the "the Houston
Symphony Partners' Mad as a March Hare Symphony Surplus Salvage Spring
Cleaning Clearance Sale" noun phrase.
   The responses would be "answers to the questions associated with the...
   I would take "sale" as the head and use "Houston symphony partners'" 
as possessive genitive (adopting your language) for what follows, with
the sidenote that genitive here expresses affiliation/sponsorship
rather than ownership. I think "the" goes with the whole noun phrase,
but it could easily be determiner for the possessive phrase. It's the
kind of ambiguity that doesn't cause interpretive problems, assuming
there's only one group of Houston Symphony partners and one such sale.
   Neat sentence!

Craig

 Recently a colleague and I were searching the Corpus of Contemporary
> American English (Mark Davies <www.americancorpus.org>) and discovered
> the sentence below, which I thought might interest members of the list.
>
>
>>>You'll have a chance to take home some classical pieces
>>>of memorabilia at the Houston Symphony Partners' Mad
>>>as a March Hare Symphony Surplus Salvage Spring
>>>Cleaning Clearance Sale.
>
>
> This sentence ends with the single noun phrase:
>
> the Houston Symphony Partners' Mad as a March Hare Symphony Surplus
> Salvage Spring Cleaning Clearance Sale
>
> As I looked at this noun phrase several questions occurred to me.
>
> 1.  Exactly which words function as Head? Is it simply the noun 'sale'?
> Or 'clearance sale'? Or 'spring cleaning clearance sale'? Or more?
>
> 2. At the other end of the phrase, does the phrase that ends with the
> apostrophe begin with 'the' or with 'Houston'? To put it another way is
> it the clearance sale *of the Houston symphony* (i.e. it’s a kind of
> possessive)? Or should we interpret 'Houston symphony's' [without the
> word 'the] as a sort of descriptive genitive. (Sorry Herb, I know you
> don’t like that terminology, but I have to use the terminology I'm used
> to.) There are two consequences of interpreting 'Houston Symphony's' as
> a descriptive genitive: a) 'the' functions as the determiner of the
> noun phrase as a whole, and b) 'Houston Symphony's … clearance sale' is
> interpreted much like a noun + noun sequence where 'Houston Symphony's'
> functions as the first noun (sort of) and describes a type of sale,
> while 'clearance sale' (or whatever you think the Head is) functions as
> the second noun.
>
> 3. It is clear that 'Mad as a March Hare' is to be treated as a single
> constituent. What sort of a constituent is it? (e.g. Adjective,
> Adjective phrase, Other?) Would you analyze its internal structure or
> would you prefer to treat it as not having an internal structure?
>
> 4.  The sequence of seven nouns at the end of the phrase contains
> several recognizable phrases -- e.g. Symphony Surplus, Spring Cleaning
> and Clearance Sale. Would you assign an internal grammatical structure
> to match these semantically determined phrases. The result of imposing
> such a structure would be to read the sequence as involving something
> like the following sequences:
> (Symphony (Surplus))
>  (Salvage)
> (Spring (Cleaning))
> (Clearance (Sale))
>
> There is an alternative answer to question 4. That is to treat these
> seven nouns as simply an unstructured sequence of nouns which get
> INTERPRETED as having an internal semantic structure. That is, any
> structure we perceive in this sequence of nouns is merely a semantic
> structure, not a grammatical structure.
>
> I would be interested in seeing any answers list members might supply.
> In this context, I would particularly ask you to provide arguments to
> support your answers so far as possible.
>
> In addition, certainly other interesting / valuable questions could be
> asked about this construction. It might be interesting to explore the
> range of useful questions that might be explored in conjunction with
> this construction. Let me particularly encourage teachers -- and their
> students to contribute.
>
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