“Music, after all, does not argue. It invites. In an age often marked by noise and division, the most radical act may simply be to listen—patiently, attentively, and together. Yayue does not offer quick answers. Instead, it teaches an older wisdom: that harmony is not the absence of difference, but the art of holding difference with care.”
Huang Yu, dean of the graduate school at Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist University
A University Orchestra takes a World Tour
On Friday evening, Feb. 7, 2026, a distinctly Whiteheadian—and quietly hopeful—event unfolded in musical form. You can read about it here in the China Daily in an article called Classical Sounds Bring Cultures Closer.
At Flushing Town Hall in New York, audiences listened to yayue—China’s ancient ritual court music—most hearing it for the first time. Students from the Yuzhen Jinsheng Yayue Orchestra of Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist University (BNBU) brought their Jade Melody and Bronze Chime world tour to New York following a U.S. debut in Boston.
The students at BNBU and their professors offered a quiet but profound gift to the world. It was a gift to all involved: the audience and the performers, the students, together. All of the students were volunteers. As Guo Haipeng, dean of whole-person education, explained: “They all joined voluntarily out of their genuine interest in Chinese yayue and traditional Chinese culture. When they first entered the university, the Yayue Ensemble held recruitment activities, and that’s when they decided to take part.”
The performance showed how intercultural listening can become a lived practice. Read with a Whiteheadian—or more broadly, a process-relational—mind and heart, the event reveals how it gathers together several of the deepest currents in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, a philosophy that is, fittingly, influential at Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist University. (The 14th International Whitehead Conference will be held on the BNBU campus in July 2026.)
At Flushing Town Hall in New York, audiences listened to yayue—China’s ancient ritual court music—most hearing it for the first time. Students from the Yuzhen Jinsheng Yayue Orchestra of Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist University (BNBU) brought their Jade Melody and Bronze Chime world tour to New York following a U.S. debut in Boston.
The students at BNBU and their professors offered a quiet but profound gift to the world. It was a gift to all involved: the audience and the performers, the students, together. All of the students were volunteers. As Guo Haipeng, dean of whole-person education, explained: “They all joined voluntarily out of their genuine interest in Chinese yayue and traditional Chinese culture. When they first entered the university, the Yayue Ensemble held recruitment activities, and that’s when they decided to take part.”
The performance showed how intercultural listening can become a lived practice. Read with a Whiteheadian—or more broadly, a process-relational—mind and heart, the event reveals how it gathers together several of the deepest currents in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, a philosophy that is, fittingly, influential at Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist University. (The 14th International Whitehead Conference will be held on the BNBU campus in July 2026.)
Whiteheadian Themes in the Performance
The creativity of performance
Each sounding of the music was a fresh beginning. In Whitehead’s vision, the universe itself is a continual creative advance into novelty, and every moment carries the possibility of becoming more than it was. The students did not merely reproduce an ancient form; they allowed it to happen again—newly, here and now.
The creativity of tradition
Tradition appeared not as something static or finished, but as a living current. The past did not dictate the present; it offered possibilities to be taken up, reinterpreted, and transformed. Ancient court music entered the present not as a museum artifact but as a living voice, showing how fidelity to tradition can itself be a creative act—one that carries inherited forms forward by letting them speak anew in changing times and places.
The grace of patient and attentive listening (prehension)
In Whiteheadian terms, attentive listening is a form of prehension—the way a moment of experience feels, takes in, and responds to what is given. In a world hurried by schedules, metrics, and screens, the music invited listeners to slow down and prehend more fully: to feel sounds, silences, gestures, and the presence of others as part of a shared experiential field. This patience was not passive, but participatory—a receptive openness through which meaning could emerge.
The strength of persuasion
Nothing in the performance compelled belief or demanded assent. Like the persuasive power Whitehead attributes to the deepest movements of reality, the music worked by invitation, shaping feeling without force and appealing to the heart/mind without overriding freedom. For Whitehead, the universe as a whole is a harmony of harmonies—a dynamic, value-laden whole felt by human beings as an inward beckoning toward richer forms of relationship. Persuasion, in this light, is not merely an ethical preference but a cosmic one: a felt call to choose resonance over coercion, invitation over domination.
The beauty of complementary contrasts
Differences did not clash; they resonated. East and West, ancient ritual and modern city, stillness and motion formed a textured harmony. As Whitehead understood, beauty arises not from sameness, but from contrasts held together with care.
Openness to adventure and novelty
For Whitehead, reality is an adventure of ideas—an ongoing invitation to risk new forms of feeling and understanding. In this performance, students and audience alike entered that adventure together. The musicians risked bringing an ancient tradition into unfamiliar cultural space; listeners risked opening themselves to sounds, tempos, and meanings not immediately their own. This shared openness to novelty embodied Whitehead’s conviction that growth depends upon receptivity to what has not yet been tried.
The growth of whole persons
Beneath the music lay an ethical vision: that life’s fulfillment is not found in conquest or control, but in becoming more fully alive—deepening feeling, widening connection, and cultivating responsiveness to others and to the world. Education, in this light, becomes an art of becoming, and music one of its most subtle teachers.
Each sounding of the music was a fresh beginning. In Whitehead’s vision, the universe itself is a continual creative advance into novelty, and every moment carries the possibility of becoming more than it was. The students did not merely reproduce an ancient form; they allowed it to happen again—newly, here and now.
The creativity of tradition
Tradition appeared not as something static or finished, but as a living current. The past did not dictate the present; it offered possibilities to be taken up, reinterpreted, and transformed. Ancient court music entered the present not as a museum artifact but as a living voice, showing how fidelity to tradition can itself be a creative act—one that carries inherited forms forward by letting them speak anew in changing times and places.
The grace of patient and attentive listening (prehension)
In Whiteheadian terms, attentive listening is a form of prehension—the way a moment of experience feels, takes in, and responds to what is given. In a world hurried by schedules, metrics, and screens, the music invited listeners to slow down and prehend more fully: to feel sounds, silences, gestures, and the presence of others as part of a shared experiential field. This patience was not passive, but participatory—a receptive openness through which meaning could emerge.
The strength of persuasion
Nothing in the performance compelled belief or demanded assent. Like the persuasive power Whitehead attributes to the deepest movements of reality, the music worked by invitation, shaping feeling without force and appealing to the heart/mind without overriding freedom. For Whitehead, the universe as a whole is a harmony of harmonies—a dynamic, value-laden whole felt by human beings as an inward beckoning toward richer forms of relationship. Persuasion, in this light, is not merely an ethical preference but a cosmic one: a felt call to choose resonance over coercion, invitation over domination.
The beauty of complementary contrasts
Differences did not clash; they resonated. East and West, ancient ritual and modern city, stillness and motion formed a textured harmony. As Whitehead understood, beauty arises not from sameness, but from contrasts held together with care.
Openness to adventure and novelty
For Whitehead, reality is an adventure of ideas—an ongoing invitation to risk new forms of feeling and understanding. In this performance, students and audience alike entered that adventure together. The musicians risked bringing an ancient tradition into unfamiliar cultural space; listeners risked opening themselves to sounds, tempos, and meanings not immediately their own. This shared openness to novelty embodied Whitehead’s conviction that growth depends upon receptivity to what has not yet been tried.
The growth of whole persons
Beneath the music lay an ethical vision: that life’s fulfillment is not found in conquest or control, but in becoming more fully alive—deepening feeling, widening connection, and cultivating responsiveness to others and to the world. Education, in this light, becomes an art of becoming, and music one of its most subtle teachers.
Ecological Civilization and Whole Person Education
"Ecological civilization" is phrase originating in China and taken up by process philosophers around the world as an extension of Whitehead's idea of world loyalty. It is aspirational ideal that can be approximated by many different cultures and in many different local settings. It is not about ecology alone, but about a way of being-in-the-world as individuals and communities. In such a civilization people live with respect and care for the community of life and also for one another. They seek to build and live in communities that are creative, compassionate, diverse, inclusive, participatory, humane to animals, and good for the earth - with no one left behind. Such a civilization is about a whole planet, to be sure, but also whole communities and whole persons.
The curriculum at BNBU is framed around whole-person education, drawing on the traditions of teacher education and the humanities at Beijing Normal University and the Christian-rooted liberal arts heritage of Hong Kong Baptist University. BNBU's understanding of the whole person resonates deeply both with the wisdom of many Chinese traditions and with the philosophy of Whitehead. Here are some of its key features:
- Holistic Development (WPDI):
BNBU employs a Whole Person Development Index (WPDI) that encompasses six interrelated domains--intellectual, physical, professional, psychological, social, and spiritual—with the aim of fostering balanced, all-around growth rather than one-sided achievement. - Authenticity and Responsibility:
A whole person is understood as someone who is true to themselves, emotionally and ethically grounded, and responsible toward family, society, and the wider world. - “In Knowledge and in Deeds”:
Learning is not confined to classrooms or examinations. Academic understanding is joined to practice, encouraging students to become active learners, critical thinkers, and participants in volunteer service and community life. - Balancing Tradition and Globalism:
Whole-person education integrates traditional Chinese culture with a global and international perspective, enabling students to be culturally rooted while remaining open to the wider world. - Beyond “Test-Taking Machines”:
The goal is to move education beyond mere information processing toward the cultivation of compassion, creativity, moral imagination, and a lifelong desire to learn.
Taken together, this vision of whole-person education situates BNBU as an institution committed not only to academic excellence, but to the formation of persons capable of living meaningful, responsible, and connected lives.
About the Orchestra
Following the contemporary revival of yayue (traditional Chinese court music), Beijing Normal–Hong Kong Baptist University (BNBU) established the BNBU Yayue Orchestra—the first, and to date the only, fully functioning court music ensemble in Southern China. The orchestra bears the name Yuzhen Jinsheng (玉振金声), often rendered as “jade vibration and golden sound,” an expression evoking the refined resonance of classical ritual music.
The ensemble is composed of instrumentalists, drummers, dancers, and singers, who work in close coordination under the guidance of an experienced yayue specialist. Its student members come from a wide range of academic disciplines and year levels, and most begin with little or no formal musical training. Through collective study and practice, they learn the traditions of court music and integrated music-dance performance, appearing on stage in historically informed court costumes and makeup.
The ensemble is composed of instrumentalists, drummers, dancers, and singers, who work in close coordination under the guidance of an experienced yayue specialist. Its student members come from a wide range of academic disciplines and year levels, and most begin with little or no formal musical training. Through collective study and practice, they learn the traditions of court music and integrated music-dance performance, appearing on stage in historically informed court costumes and makeup.