Samaveda

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The Samaveda is the third of the four Vedas, the foundational scriptures of Vedic India, and the one given over to melody. Its name joins sāman, a chant or sung formula, with veda, knowledge: it is the knowledge of how the sacred words are sung. Where the Rigveda preserves hymns as text and the Yajurveda the sacrificial formulae, the Samaveda exists to be performed aloud, and almost all of its verses are not original to it — they are taken over from the Rigveda, above all from the eighth and ninth books, and rearranged for singing.

What distinguishes it is therefore not its words but their setting. The collection comes down in two parts: the ārcika, the verses themselves, and the gāna, the song-books that prescribe how each is to be drawn out, repeated, and inflected, with syllables stretched and interpolated sounds (stobha) added to carry the melodic line. The result is that a single Rigvedic verse, sung, becomes something the eye could not have predicted from the page. In the great Soma sacrifices it was the office of one class of priest, the udgātṛ, to perform these chants, and the Samaveda is in effect their manual.

Scholarship places the formation of this material in the later second and earlier first millennium BCE, alongside the other Vedic collections, and treats it as among the oldest continuously transmitted musical traditions known — handed down for many centuries by memory, with elaborate techniques of recitation guarding the sound against drift before it was ever written. Indian tradition holds the Vedas to be śruti, “that which is heard”: uncreated and without human author, held to have been received by the ancient seers rather than composed. On this understanding the Samaveda’s melodies are not a human ornament laid over the hymns but part of the revelation itself, and later Indian thought has often traced the origins of classical music back to its chant.

Attached to the Samaveda is one of the principal Upanishads, the Chāndogya, whose name itself derives from the word for its singers; in it the meditation on sound and on the sacred syllable Om is developed at length, so that the Veda of chant became also a setting for early speculation on what the chanting meant. The tradition that grew from these texts continued to hold that the form of the sound mattered as much as its sense — that the rite was carried not only by what was said but by how it was made to be heard.

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