Practicing----what is it?

When I was in grad school, practicing was what you did instead of homework, or for some people, instead of life. You spent hours secluded in the blue concrete practice rooms of the Cincinatti Conservatory, or in the moldy green-carpeted practice rooms of Juilliard School, practicing repertoire, practicing scales against metronome beats, trying to ignore the musicians in the adjacent cubicles who were also practicing: the french horn player blowing down the Wall of Jericho behind your back, and the mad pianist shaking the rafters in front of you, that same violinist still repeating the same insanely virtuosic passage in a distant corner of y0ur ear every time the other two let up for a moment.
With those kind of practice conditions, it's not surprising that most students end up getting good at playing loud and fast: it's a daily race, a buzzing hive of practicers, frantically inspiring each other, and competing with each other, and irritating each other, and at the same time, trying to drown each other out along with the rest of the world.
Since then, I've come to realize that the essence of practicing is about consciousness and becoming progressively more conscious---bringing more and deeper qualities of the music into your consciousness, achieving more awareness of your fingers, your body, your breath so that they can come together in a focused way and achieve little miracles. It's about becoming aware of things that were subconscious, working with them, playing with them, finally transcending them by including them in your repertoire of moves and sounds and expression.
In other words, I think that really good practicing involves opening your mind and your body and your awareness to sensation, to understanding, to sound, to motion...to whatever needs to be known, so that it can be taken in and become part of who you are.
And it's hard to open yourself up when your environment is requiring that a part of you be working hard to close itself down. It is possible, though----as I understand it, Shostakovich composed incredible music (using his inner ear, no less) while his wife was in the next room teaching loud piano lessons all day.
A friend of mine, Gene Pritzker, also a composer, had his studio literally twenty feet away from the 125th street subway bridge, with bone-rattling trains going by day and night. He said he loved it, that it inspired him. He calls himself Noizepunk now and he seems to have transcended and included the sounds of 125th noise traffic in quite a bit of his music. That took practice, and he had the ideal practice room.
Nada Brahma, I say. (Sound is God) Actually, that's a part of my daily practice.