The Gāna Books · Chapter Overview
From The Sāmaveda — The Veda That Is Sung, taught by Acharya T Krishnatrey. This lesson is free to read.
<pre data-block="statement"> 🕉️ Everything so far has been the text. This chapter is the music — and without it there is no Sāmaveda. The Veda comes in two halves. The Ārcika are the verse-books you have been reading: bare mantras, in order. The Gāna are the song-books: the melodies, written out with the words stretched, repeated and interrupted to fit the tune. A sāman is not a verse. A sāman is a melody, and it has its own name. There are four gāna collections. Two are basic — the Grāmageya, "to be sung in the settlement", and the Āraṇyageya, "to be sung in the forest". Two are derived — the Ūha and the Ūhya, which take those same melodies and shift them onto the Uttarārcika's verses in the order the ritual actually requires. This chapter covers the four books, the named parts of a sung sāman, the three priests who sing them, the seven descending svaras that stand behind the later Indian scale, and the strange meaningless syllables called stobhas that the singers thread through the sacred words. </pre>