Since his arrival on the instrumental music scene, mandolinist Ethan Setiawan has enjoyed pushing creative boundaries, even as he continues to embrace the traditional sounds of his chosen instrument. That approach helped him get welcomed into the circles of esteemed artists like Darol Anger, who produced his 2022 album, Gambit. That connection and others have culminated in Encyclopedia Mandolinnica, an album that speaks to both the instrument’s storied past and how players like Setiawan can help carry these traditional sounds into the modern age.
Setiawan came from Indiana to the Berklee College of Music in Boston and stayed in the area after graduation, residing in rural Maine about 90 minutes to the West of Portland. To gain admittance to Berklee, there is an audition process where you play for a while then talk to administrators about your goals. He chose a Bud Powell number (Bouncing with Bud). “You prepare something and they’ll probably ask you to improvise as well,” Setiawan said, “and then do some sight reading from sheet music they put in front of you.”
Instrumentalists often play in multiple combinations. Setiawan has a string band along with an ensemble called Fine Ground, and also performs as a duo with fiddler Louise Bichan (Hildaland) that plays Scottish old-time fiddle style. “There are a lot of different things that I like to do and a lot of different types of music that I’m interested in,” he explains. “Each project scratches a different type of itch. For the past couple years, I’ve played with the Acoustic Nomads, which is more jazz and Latin music.” Besides all that, he has made a record with BB Bowness, a bluegrass banjo player. Lots going on.
The photo on Setiawan’s website shows him surrounded by a plethora of instruments. They’re mostly mandolins of some type, a couple just straight up mandolins and a couple of octave mandolins. “Part of the whole thing with this record of mandolin duets that I put out back in August 2025 was it looked at the entire family of the mandolin: the mandolin tuned like the violin, the mandola tuned like the viola, the mandocello tuned like the cello. There’s even a mandobass, which is tuned like a bass. It’s this gigantic instrument that sounds pretty bad. Regular bass sounds much better, but it exists, and it’s good to have one.” Spoken like a true stringed-instrument collector.
Seeing the beautiful instruments is one thing, but hearing Setiawan and his collaborators playing them is the real thing. They bounce off of each other, seizing every sound they can, and it’s positively enthralling at every turn and triumph. Big Hill with Andrew Marlin is an irresistible jaunt that quickly loops around into something terrifically contemporary and uncategorizable. The album is the kind of unpredictable music listeners crave, as it oscillates through various levels of harmonies, swirling, multi-patterned chord progressions and tempo-shifts. It’s all very baroque, surreal and heart-warming, in the kind of way that feels as much like a road trip through a century of music as it does a modern-day discovery of something plentiful, handsome, ornate and decidedly new.
“In the arranging process, it was pretty open,” Setiawan said. “I would try to come in with something of a plan if nothing arose from the collaboration, to have something that we could fall back on. But especially with Andrew Marlin, I sent him the A and the B parts of the tune, and he came up with that whole bridge section. The beauty of working with other people is that they’ll think of things and want to do things that you never would’ve thought of yourself.”
The album has some geographical breadth to it. Forecast was recorded with Matt Flinner at his house in Vermont. The duo found new ways of creating harmonies as easily as finding spare change under the sofa cushions, two layered mandolins woven together to create a lovely, uplifting melody. “I would try to write, not to imitate the style of the person that I was playing with, but to write something that I thought might fit them well,” he expressed. Few of the best pickers are found in Maine, however, so Setiawan lampshaded the problem by taking his mandolin and songs on the road. “I just went to where everyone was, which seemed easier and simpler than trying to get people to come to me. So, I would just go places and find a studio and book a morning or an afternoon. It was a very fun record to make.”
That took him to Glasgow, Scotland to record Shenk’s with Laura-Beth Salter, Nashville for Back At It with Darol Anger and Sharon Gilchrist, Michigan with John Reischman for the delightful Rockingham Waltz, and Germany where Mike Marshall joined him on Victoria and Caterina Lichtenberg on Brothers & Sisters. One of the highlights was recorded back home in Maine with Joe K. Walsh. Spiraling lines overtake each other before coming into the clear on Mount Holly, a funky, undulating tune of intrigue that is not stuck in some generic box but instead is an experiment of blending sounds that feel correct. Setiawan is more than capable of playing a few thousand notes as if they were silver dollars tumbling out of a slot machine after you hit the jackpot, and that is part of the appeal, but it is his way of meshing with his guest musicians that sounds seamless. This twinning of the lineages adds a splash of additional flavor to the duets.
“For collaboration, I look for somebody with thoughts and opinions, somebody that has really open ears and is willing to try a bunch of different things,” Setiawan advises. “Someone that’s interested in not just taking the easy way out, if that makes sense, or taking the obvious path. Also, I’ll look for somebody who plays individually, in a style all their own, and is interested in looking a little deeper than what might first meet the eye. It’s nice to play with people with who you are on the same page, but having some ideas you may not have thought about is important, too.”
In essence, he is looking for arrangements that excites them and pushes their shared musical expertise forward. The aptly titled Blazing Star with Jacob Joliff is an enthralling exercise of tension and release driven, first and foremost, by the pair’s interest in playing around with what it means to relieve that tension and what happens when you don’t. Amidst this wondrous assembly of originals, one cover is found, the chestnut I Hear a Rhapsody with Don Stiernberg helping to propel the tune doggedly forward like a six-foot wave of anticipation, while Setiawan cruised past the flashy breaks like a jet airliner taxiing past the reflectors on an airport landing strip.
Asked if any of these musicians had taken him out of his comfort zone, Setiawan replied: “It happens a lot. People say you should never be the best musician in any project. That’s a great way to get complacent and go stale. So, I always try to be surrounded by people that I admire musically. Great things can happen when you’re out of your comfort zone. Those are the moments that push you to dig deeper and try to grow musically and find out what it is that you might be able to do.”
Down the road, Setiawan would enjoy another round of duos. For sure, Darol Anger is still on his wish list. “He just made another duets record; he made the first one in the ‘90s with his heroes and mentors,” he said, eyes sparkling at the thought. Gambit, which was another one of the pandemic-delayed albums, was a mixed-bag of styles: jazz, bluegrass, newgrass. “I made this big road trip out to California where Darol was living at the time, and we had these really nice couple weeks out there, working through the material. Darol would be down in the studio at 3 a.m. working on fiddle parts.”
The backdrop for these songs is an explosive clashing of traditional mandolin styles with modern improvisation. None of it feels even a tad anachronistic, out of time or place. To Setiawan, it is all in the creative process. “There is always some, well, just throwing paint at the wall,” he offered. “I write in basically two stages: melody and harmony, the two sides of the composition. I try different combinations of notes, chords and phrase endings. You want to be objective and explore all the ways notes can harmonize. Whatever I can do to be creative is the idea.”
There is some humor and playfulness to temper the serious, elite playing. For example, the tune Slurpee recorded with Moriah Ozberkmen has nothing to do with stopping at a convenience store for a slushy refreshment. “No,” was the reply, “but that’s a good guess. I named that from the quality of the tune. It’s sort of slide-y and slinky, especially in the first part.”
He likes to fly fish, cook and read in his, ahem, spare time. He is passionate about jazz harmony and picks, lots of picks, different picks. “It’s kind of a big thing for us mandolin players, just trying to figure out what the best type of pick is. Actually, a lot of the American mandolinists use really thick picks, based around getting a big sound out of the instrument, a kind of a fat sound. The Scottish/Irish people tend to use really thin picks, which helps with some right-hand stuff. There’s a lot of quick triplets in the tunes, and the pick helps with that. Lately, I’ve been switching it up with picks every couple of months. It causes you to change subtle things about your right-hand technique.”
You have to question why he hasn’t been drawn to Nashville or North Carolina like many instrumentalists, who have concluded those are places you need to be to further your career. “Nashville has an amazing scene, of course, a lot of great musicians down there. I moved to Boston for school and just got to know the scene up here, and I like the area, the overall thing that New England has going on. Plus, I have a good group of pals here. A lot of my touring is basically regional in New England, which is really easy to do if you’re driving all around. Playing in a small area is very manageable.”
One thing Setiawan been giving a lot of thought to recently is something Joe K. Walsh said to him. Besides contributing to Encyclopedia Mandolinnica, Walsh was also one of his teachers during his years at Berklee and is a good pal who lives in Portland, so the two players get together often. “One thing he said to me as I was leaving school is that right now is the hardest it’s ever going to be, which is always true. Everything gets easier the longer you’re at it, which I think is kind of indicative of the mindset that it’s a marathon not a sprint. We’re here for the long run, and it’s about keeping this slow upward climb and sticking with it. I think that’s a big part of making it work in this business as simplistic as that sounds.”
