It’s a mistake to think that mistakes exist.

Wrap your brain around that, and if you recover from it, read on.

The Cambridge dictionary defines a mistake as “an action, decision, or judgment that produces an unwanted or unintentional result.” Merriam-Webster calls it “a wrong judgment: MISUNDERSTANDING; a wrong action or statement proceeding from faulty judgment, inadequate knowledge, or inattention.” Collins says it’s “an error or blunder in action, opinion, or judgment, a misconception or misunderstanding.”

It'd be a mistake to invite Cambridge, Webster, and Collins to your party. They’d pick endless fights on the definition of every last thing.

Cambridge: “A mistake depends on how you define it, you moron!”

Collins: “You’re wrong and mistaken, you snotty snob!”

Webster: “Your fly is undone, unless I misunderstand it.”

A while ago, a pianist friend of mine told me a story. Somebody she knew had attended a violin-and-piano recital given by two established professionals. The pianist seemed disoriented part of the time; he would stop playing for long stretches, and the violinist would continue by herself until the pianist caught up with her and rejoined the music-making.

Crazy, huh? Collins: “The pianist made a tremendous number of mistakes. He shouldn’t perform in public.”

But the person who related the story to my friend said that the recital was deeply affecting, quite remarkable, troubling, strange and wonderful. Cambridge: “What the hell are you talking about?”

Our friends the Dictionnaires Doctrinaires attach words like “wrong, misunderstanding, misconceptions, errors, blunders, inadequate knowledge, and your fly is undone” to the notion of mistake.

I’ll put my neck out (Webster: “You’re making a mistake, Pedro!”) and redefine mistake as “an event that carries information, period!” Period and exclamation mark, of course!

Information is neutral. It’s the interpretation of information that might give rise to a judgment of right or wrong, good or bad, stroke of genius or fatal mistake.

Music is being made in a certain way: that’s an event, carrying a lot of information. You sit there, watching and listening: you, too, are “an event,” in and of yourself; you, too, are “information.” The outside and the inside interact: the event-that-is-a-performance and the event-that-is-you-yourself-attending-a-performance; the information out there and the information in there. The informational interaction creates meaning, emotions, connections, memories; the interaction is propagated beyond the physical limits of the two interlaced events. You’re reading a blog post about an event which I heard about from a friend who heard about it. And you’ll comment on it or share the post with a friend, an enemy, or a frenemy (depending on your inner dictionary). Where’s the mistake?

Zeno and Plato met in a bar. “It's a mistake to think that mistakes exist,” they said in unison, making absolutely no mistakes in intonation or rhythm. Socrates rolled his eyes, and Aristotle married Jacqueline Kennedy, née Bouvier, henceforth known as Jackie O.

Cambridge, Collins, and Webster: “Basta, Pedro!”

The assumption that to make music you must move your body a lot is widely shared, by audiences and musicians alike. Some people think that the only way for a musician to express himself or herself fully is by “moving with the music," and it’s true that there are many great instrumentalists, singers, and conductors who take a balletic, athletic approach to music. But there have always been master musicians who, instead of moving with the music, let music “move through them” and on to the audience. In fact, by remaining relatively still musicians actually condense and heighten the power of music to move the audience.

What I call the oppositional principle in music—where the musician opposes the movement of music through the stillness of his or her body—applies to all fields of music-making. You might suppose that jazz musicians usually move an awful lot when they play. After all, those guys improvise crazy stuff and lead wild personal lives, right? Counterintuitive as it may seem, the jazz greats move almost not at all when they perform. Check this clip with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie—two of the greatest players ever—and watch how little they move. An interesting detail is that when Dizzy lifts and drops his trumpet, he does it at a very slow tempo, much slower than the tempo of the music.

Moral of the story: If you stand still, the craziness just gets deeper, broader—and better.