The Udgatri's duties being mainly confined to the chanting of hymns made up of detached groups of verses of the _Rigveda_, as collected in the Samaveda-samhita, the more important Brahmanas of this sacerdotal class deal chiefly with the various modes of chanting, and the modifications which the verses have to undergo in their musical setting. Moreover, the performance of chants being almost entirely confined to the Soma-sacrifice, it is only a portion, though no doubt the most important portion, of the sacrificial ceremonial that enters into the subject matter of the Samaveda Brahmamas.
As regards the Brahmanas of the _Rigveda_, two of such works have been handed down, the _Aitareya_ and the _Kaushitaki_ (or _Sankhayana)-Brahmanas_, which have a large amount of their material in common. But while the former work (transl. into English by M. Haug) is mainly taken up with the Soma-sacrifice, the latter has in addition thereto chapters on the other forms of sacrifice. Being intended for the Hotri's use, both these works treat exclusively of the hymns and verses recited by that priest and his assistants, either in the form of connected litanies or in detached verses invoking the deities to whom oblations are made, or uttered in response to the solemn hymns chanted by the Udgatris.
It is, however, to the Brahmanas and Sutras of the _Yajurveda_, dealing with the ritual of the real offering-priest, the Adhvaryu, that we have to turn for a connected view of the sacrificial procedure in all its material details. Now, in considering the body of writings connected with this Veda, we are at once confronted by the fact that there are two different schools, an older and a younger one, in which the traditional body of ritualistic matter has been treated in a very different way. For while the younger school, the _Vajasaneyins_, have made a clear severance between the sacred texts or mantras and the exegetic discussions thereon--as collected in the _Vajasaneyi-samhita_ and the _Satapatha-Brahmana_ (trans. by J. Eggeling, in _Sacred Books of the East_) respectively--arranged systematically in accordance with the ritual divisions, the older school on the other hand present their materials in a hopelessly jumbled form; for not only is each type of sacrifice not dealt with continuously and in orderly fashion, but short textual sections of mantras are constantly followed immediately by their dogmatic exegesis; the term _brahmana_ thus applying in their case only to these detached comments and not to the connected series of them. Thus the most prominent subdivision of the older school, the _Taittiriyas_, in their _Samhita_, have treated the main portion of the ceremonial in this promiscuous fashion, and to add to the confusion they have, by way of supplement, put forth a so-called _Taittiriya-brahmana_, which, so far from being a real Brahmana, merely deals with some additional rites in the same confused mixture of sacrificial formulae and dogmatic explanations. It is not without reason, therefore, that those two schools, the older and the younger, are commonly called the Black (_krishna_) and the White (_sukla_) Yajus respectively.