In the folklore of Orkney, the wind-and-rain-lashed, green-cliffed archipelago in the north of Scotland, “Hildaland” — meaning “hidden land” — is a paradisiacal island, invisible to most, that is the summer home of the Finfolk, a race of magical sea-people. Hildaland is also the name of a musical duo, fiddler Louise Bichan, who was born in Orkney, and mandolinist Ethan Setiawan, from the small town of Goshen, Ind.
Bichan and Setiawan met at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, from which they graduated in 2019. They’ve been playing together ever since. The pair will perform at Wellfleet Preservation Hall on Thursday, April 17.
Bichan grew up in a house full of music. “My granny had a beautiful singing voice,” she says. “My grandad would occasionally pick up an accordion.” Her mother played the guitar and, as a young woman, sometimes sneaked out of the house in the evenings to attend folk sessions that went late.
At school, Bichan says, she listened, “jaw to the floor,” as an older kid played the fiddle on the playground. She figured out where the fiddle lessons took place in her school: in a room next to the water fountain. “I used to say, ‘Can I go get a drink of water?’ They’d have to drag me back to class, because I was standing with my ear to the door.”
Setiawan began on the cello, playing classical music. At 13, drawn to the improvisation in bluegrass and old-time traditional music, he took up the mandolin, then the ukulele, the mountain dulcimer, and the lap dulcimer. The mandolin is “the one that stuck,” he says.
Hildaland’s debut album, Sule Skerry, came out in 2023. It’s a collection of traditional tunes reimagined, some original tunes, and some songs, which Bichan and Setiawan both sing.
Fiddle and mandolin are “a funny pairing on the surface,” says Setiawan. A standard mandolin is tuned just like a violin, with G, D, A, and E strings separated by fifths. When Bichan and Setiawan share a melody, he says, “I try to feel as much like one instrument as possible.”
Of course, the two instruments aren’t the same. “With the fiddle, played with a bow, everything can feel very long and sweeping,” says Setiawan. “With the mandolin, you have a definite attack with the pick.” When Setiawan plays the octave mandolin — tuned an octave lower than standard — the relationship changes: it sounds almost like a guitar, and the sound deepens.
In “Tune for Ellice,” the first track on Sule Skerry, Bichan’s fiddle dances lightly over Setiawan’s atmospheric plucking. Bichan’s “Scotch snaps” — a syncopated rhythm in which a short, accented note is followed by a long one — evoke the image of a girl’s legs skipping under her flying skirt, while the mandolin provides the Scottish landscape a listener imagines beneath her.
That tune sounds distinctly Scottish. But the album defies easy categorization. “The Selkie of Sule Skerry,” the duo’s reworking of a traditional ballad, begins with a mandolin prelude that sounds like the modal musing of an Arabic oud. Bichan sings in a voice unperturbed by ornament or vibrato. Two-thirds of the way through the track, a synth drone by Sam Kassirer plunges the song into enveloping darkness.
Bichan and Setiawan previously played in a four-person band called Corner House. In a larger group, says Setiawan, the sound naturally expands upward and outward, louder and fuller.
“The fewer people in the band, the quieter your ceiling is,” he says. “If you can’t go high, might as well see what’s down low.” Hildaland’s dynamic range isn’t a shrunken version of a larger band’s; instead, Bichan and Setiawan explore the oft-hidden corners of musical quietude.
Playing quietly “is a really underutilized tool these days,” says Setiawan. “It’s such a powerful thing.”
The duo’s relationship is built on trust: the assurance that nonverbal cues will be understood. With trust comes spontaneity. Setiawan often surprises Bichan with chord changes or invents a harmony on the spot, she says. Bichan tends to focus more on melody.
“I appreciate Louise letting me do whatever I want on stage,” says Setiawan.
Some moments require the musicians to engage only each other, lost in a world of their own making. Other moments, says Bichan, allow the audience more actively into the performance. “When something is established, when there’s something to latch on to,” says Setiawan, the audience starts to understand when a tune will repeat or when a chord will change.
Bichan often ponders the question of audience engagement. “A lot of traditional music, by definition, is not really supposed to be performed,” she says. “It’s music of the people.”
In the 18th and 19th centuries, when Scottish people began to emigrate to North America, especially Nova Scotia, they brought their music with them. “Music travels and grows and changes,” says Bichan. “Our music was somewhat oppressed for a time.” The English considered Scottish music to be for poor people, she says, and classical music to be proper. On Cape Breton, isolated from outside influence, “the music almost froze in time,” says Bichan. “At one point, there were people from Cape Breton going back to Scotland to re-teach what had been lost there.”
At Berklee, says Bichan, she and Setiawan studied with Bruce Molsky. Bichan took his course Old Time Fiddle Ensemble. There were times, she says, when Molsky introduced a tune as a waltz, and she’d recognize it as a Scottish jig. “He’s playing this beautiful waltz that’s kind of crooked, and you can totally hear the relationship between the two.”
As for her own compositions, Bichan says, “I’ve always just sat down, and a tune kind of spills out of me.” Recently, she’s been listening to and playing more old-time tunes, and those “flavors” have shown up in her writing.
At Wellfleet Preservation Hall, Hildaland will play tunes both old and new — “music from both sides of the pond,” says Bichan.
Often, after performances, listeners will approach the musicians. “It’s always a great honor,” says Bichan. “One of the biggest goals as a musician is to make people feel things.” Sometimes the person is in tears, lost in remembrance, affected beyond words.
“Happy tears,” says Setiawan.
“We haven’t had anyone come up with bad tears,” Bichan agrees.
The Fiddle and the Mandolin
The event: Hildaland performs Scottish and old-time tunes
The time: Thursday, April 17, 7 p.m.
The place: Wellfleet Preservation Hall, 335 Main St.
The cost: $20 in advance at wellfleetpreservationhall.org; $25 at the door
