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What you are calling "awareness" sounds like what I mean by pattern matching. When I'm "on" as a musician, this "pattern matching" operates on a variety of time scales--multiple concerts, this concert, this piece, this verse, this phrase, this chord-- and multiple people scales--me, my fellow musicians, different people in the audience, the audience as a whole.

At the very highest level (perhaps five times in my life) any consciousness of all this disappears, even though I'm sure all those factors are still influencing my behavior. Strangely, this is absolutely sublime in music but I tend to produce code I later regret when programming in this zone.

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"What you are calling "awareness" sounds like what I mean by pattern matching"

Perhaps pattern matching is involved. What I'm thinking of are occasions when one is listening to a very good musician and one is very taken by a particular phrase or lick. The pleasure in that moment is intense, but it's often hard to put the cause of that pleasure into words or even to replicate it musically. I often find that I have to go back and analyze what happened, sometimes by playing back a recording at half speed. Even then, I can fail to replicate the essence of what was good in that moment. There's a certain discipline of awareness one has to practice. Even though I'm able to produce a resemblance of what I've heard, this often lacks the essence of what gave me the pleasure. I have to be aware that I'm reproducing the right thing sonically, and not just taking pleasure from mastering a new sequence of movements. (And it's quite common to meet musicians who just stop at doing the latter.)

Pattern matching might be involved, but it's only part of it. There's a kind of introspection involved in figuring out what made it work. I have to think about how I'm feeling and connect that causally to some particular nuance or combination of things.