MONIQUE DIMATTINA COMPOSES BEAUTY
SUBJECT Monique diMattina
OCCUPATION Pianist, singer, composer
INTERVIEWER Nathan Scolaro
PHOTOGRAPHER Gregory Lorenzutti
LOCATION Melbourne, Australia
DATE June, 2021
In my first few weeks of working at Dumbo Feather, seven years ago now, I was flung out of the nervous cocoon I’d built around my desk over to the workplace piano, where the team was gathering for its inaugural choir session. As I walked over, the most dazzling music was playing – notes and trills that took me out of my head and into my body. We were asked to lay down and soak it up, a rare invitation to bathe in beauty. The woman sending us into this rapturous state was the leader of the choir, Monique diMattina. Every Monday afternoon thereafter she’d have us humming and thrumming and slapping our cheeks, before taking us through a four-part arrangement of Edith Piaf’s, “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.” We’d leave the place soaring, lighter than clouds, bonded in this feeling of ecstasy. It was the best initiation to a job one could ask for.
Monique understands how music casts spells, how it engulfs us on a whole-body level. A pianist, singer-songwriter, composer and educator, she spent 10 years living in New York on a Fullbright scholarship in her twenties, observing and learning from the greats while fine tuning her own style, which today swings from jazz to classical to roots, depending on her appetite at the time. Her most recent album, TIDES, which she made during Melbourne’s 2020 lockdown, between home-schooling her two daughters and tutoring her VCA and Monash University students online, is an exquisite collection of piano miniatures. It is the perfect soundtrack to pursuits of beauty and poetry, or for merely cleaning the house – if what one seeks in that moment is to be enlivened and stop time. Monique is sass and joy and love and sophistication, wrapped up in a clever quip and a yearning to connect. For her, global fame isn’t the pull, it’s playing at the local jazz bar for the baker up the road, and knowing that her music lands somewhere, like sunlight reaches a flower.
NATHAN SCOLARO: How are you going there with the lockdown?
MONIQUE DIMATTINA: Fine. I can’t complain. The girls take care of themselves with the homeschool these days – we’re all better at it. I’m just lucky I haven’t got little ones. And I’m into a routine now. Getting some work done.
Oh you did good then. I really struggled with this one. I’ve been resisting all of the good things that I was doing last year. I couldn’t get a routine in my day. I didn’t want to meditate or exercise. I’ve just been working and waiting for it to be over. And I really suffered as well. It made me realise how important those things are. I felt that my wellbeing diminished because I’ve been so sloppy about it.
It’s really tangible isn’t it? Day to day. And it’s a slippery slope. You let one thing go and then you let other things go. I mean we’re all different. Not everyone needs to be so calibrated. But I really need those routines and quite disciplined systems to feel great. Probably a lot of it is just what my mind believes too.
Well, that’s
