ABSTRACT
The proposition that forms the basis for this paper, that musical notation is both a product and an indicator of the provenance and the antecedents of sources, is not new. It has been used to some effect to study the origins of both works and sources for the Italian Ars Nova and Italianate notational traits from this period have been detected in sources as late as the 1430s. There are, however, many situations where only one ligature is present, but which can be interpreted in the same manner. The wide range of variation to be found among sources is even greater in the case of minor color. The balance between decoration and function does, of course, have to be determined for each source studied. It is the internal consistency of the patterns of both ligatures and coloration that is crucial to understanding their possible values to the scribe.
