The historical development of Vedic exegesis, as attested in the Rgvedic and Sāmavedic commentaries, remains virtually unexplored, although those that survive have long been available in print, those of the Sāmaveda since the 1870s (the Sāmavedic Sāyana) and 1941 (the relatively early Mādhava and the later Bharatasvāmin). A new edition of the Ārcika or recitation text of the chanted Sāmaveda, currently appearing in the Harvard Oriental Series, combines some improved readings for its commentaries with several disappointing features, notably the failure (so far) to provide either the crucial melodic transcriptions (Gāna) of chanted texts or the bracketing of spurious passages in Sāyana, both of which are valuable assets of the Bibliotheca Indica edition. In this article, an attempt is made to show that the Ārcika commentators Mādhava and Bharatasvāmin have no independent value, being wholly dependent upon Skandasvāmin's Nirukta commentary and the Vedārthaprakāśa that subsists in Sāyana's Sāmavedic and Rgvedic adaptations; and that they were themselves responsible for the unhappy compromise between Gāna performance and Rgvedic poetry that the Ārcika corpus actually represents, and hence ultimately also for the two recensions of Vedārthaprakāśa that are ascribed to Sāyana in the fourteenth century.