Goshen College student named youngest National Mandolin Champion

September 23, 2014

Ethan Setiawan focuses on his mandolin performance during the 2014 National Mandolin Championship contest in Winfield, Kansas. (Photo provided)

Ethan Setiawan first picked up a mandolin in 2010, when he was 13 years old. Last Friday, at the age of 17, he was the youngest person ever to be named national mandolin champion at the Walnut Valley Bluegrass Festival in Winfield, Kansas.

Setiawan, who lives in Middlebury and studies at Goshen College through the early enrollment program, earned the top spot in the National Mandolin Championship by doing what he’s done a thousand times – lowering his head and focusing on the instrument.

“A lot of practice went into this,” Setiawan said. “During a competition where you’re being judged, you just have to do what you do and hope the judges like it.”

The 23 mandolinists in the competition were judged on arrangement, execution, tuning, show value and overall impression. They had just five minutes to impress the judges.

“There’s a lot of focus involved in the playing just because of the high stakes,” Setiawan said. “After it was over I was pretty wiped.”

He hopes to do more performing now that he’s won. He currently performs with two other Goshen College students in a band called Theory Expats, as well as with the band Mutual Kumquat. He has also toured with the bluegrass duo The Matchsellers.

Nathan Graber-McCrae earned third place in the National Hammer Dulcimer Championship.

Setiwan began studying cello under Brook Bennett through Goshen’s Community School of the Arts at the age of eight. He has studied with jazz mandolinist Don Stiernberg for the past two years. In 2013, he was a Swannanoa Gathering Youth Scholar in Ashville, North Carolina, and attended the Berklee College of Music’s five-week Summer Performance Program in Boston in 2014.

In winning the National Mandolin Championship, Setiawan earned a $275 cash prize, a trophy, a custom crafted mandolin and is invited to perform in the 2015 Walnut Valley Festival Champion Showcase Concert.

Setiawan wasn’t the only person with a Goshen College connection to earn a win at the Walnut Valley Bluegrass Festival. Nathan Graber-McCrae, a 2009 Goshen College graduate from Denver, Colorado, placed third in the National Hammer Dulcimer Championship.