The Veda of Melody

The Sama Veda is the "Veda of songs" (saman, "chant"), and it is the most dependent of the four: the overwhelming majority of its verses are drawn directly from the Rig Veda, chiefly from the ninth and eighth books, and rearranged not for their meaning but for their melody. Its purpose is musical and liturgical.

In the great soma sacrifices of Vedic religion the priest called the udgatr and his assistants sang these verses to fixed melodies (saman), and the Sama Veda encodes those melodies through elaborate notation, stretching, repeating and inserting syllables (stobha, meaningless sung sounds like "ho" and "hau") to fit the tune. Its importance is therefore out of proportion to its verbal originality: it is the fountainhead of the Indian musical tradition, and Indian sources traditionally derive the art of music from it. As one of the four Vedas it counts as shruti, "that which is heard," the highest and directly revealed class of Hindu scripture, even though most of its words are the Rig Veda's sung to a different end.