Coda

Coda (Italian for "tail"; from the Latin cauda), in music, a term for a passage which brings a movement or a separate piece to a conclusion. This developed from the simple chordss of a cadence into an elaborate and independent form. In a series of variations on a theme or in a composition with a fixed order of subjects, the coda is a passage sufficiently contrasted with the conclusions of the separate variations or subjects, added to form a complete conclusion to the whole. Beethoven raised the coda to a feature of the highest importance.

In music notation, the coda symbol is used as a navigation marker, similarly to the dal Segno sign. It looks like a large O with a + superimposed.

It is encountered mainly in transcriptions of popular music, and is used where the exit from a repeated section is within that section rather than at the end. The instruction "To Coda" indicated that the performer is to jump to the separate section headed with the symbol.

---

The first part of this article originally came from a well-known 1911 encyclopedia

Coda is also the name of an experimental filesystem from Carnegie-Mellon-University.