The amazing part of this song, written by fifteen-year-old Charles Ives, is the middle section. This is a three-verse song whose opening and closing verses are set to the same music, but with a middle section for the second verse that suddenly shifts to an entirely different sound.

The A sections of this ABA form are in a gentle, diatonic G Major, disturbed at only one point when a strange A# Major chord in the left hand appears from nowhere. The B section runs wildly through several strange chords and new keys before returning to the opening G Major.

All this is barely suitable to the text, which s a conventional love song. Amidst all the innovation of the B Section, Ives naively resorts to the hoary old gesture of a falling figure on the words "dying, dying."

The two portions of the song are not especially compatible, so It does not hold together well, but it definitely shows promise and originality.

In 1894, when Ives started attending Yale, he applied to the newly-appointed professor of musical composition, Horatio Parker, to be permitted to audit his music courses. (At that time Freshmen at Yale could only take a curriculum of specific liberal arts courses, with no electives.)

Parker recognized that young Ives was musically advanced and agreed to let him into the courses, and to give private composition lessons. When Parker asked Ives to bring in samples of his work, Ives included "At Parting."

Ives had been brought up by his musician father, George Ives, to know and understand the traditional rules of composition, but with the freedom to question and break them as it seemed necessary. According to Ives' later recollection, Parker would have none of that. His finger flew to one of the unresolved dissonances in the B Section and declared, "There's no excuse for that!"

Charles wrote back to his father, who answered, "Tell Parker that every dissonance doesn't have to resolve, if it doesn't happen to feel like it, any more than every horse should have to have its tail bobbed just because it's the prevailing fashion."

Within a month George Ives died, unexpectedly. Ives evidently did not take his father's advice and challenge Parker directly. He tried his experiments privately, and "kept pretty steadily to the regular classroom work."

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