For 22 years, Access Contemporary Music has created concerts, festivals, commissions, and new ways to experience music all over Chicago. Now, for the first time, we have a dedicated home for all of it. And we’re going to use the hell out of it.
This is ACM Presents: our first full season of original programming at The CheckOut.
We’re filling our new home with classic silent films accompanied by new scores from Chicago composers, exceptional pianists playing just a few feet away, guided listening concerts that take great music apart and put it back together again, immersive performances, new commissions, Chicago stories, and whatever else we dream up along the way.
ACM has always treated classical music as a living, breathing, curious, adventurous art form. Now that we have a place to do that year-round we’re going to have some fun and we hope you’ll join us.
Score & Screen
Something alchemical happens when live music meets silent film. The image changes the way you hear the music, the music changes the way you see the image, and suddenly a century-old film feels immediate and alive.
Score & Screen reimagines classic silent cinema with new scores commissioned from Chicago composers and performed live by classical ensembles at The CheckOut. This season includes Fantômas, Nosferatu, Aelita: Queen of Mars, Georges Méliès, The Fall of the House of Usher, and Ballet Mécanique.
Explore Score & Screen →The Discovery Series
Think of the Discovery Series as a book club for music. We take one great piece, talk about what makes it tick, perform it live, talk about it again, then perform it a second time with fresh ears.
Afterward, the conversation continues over a catered reception with the musicians and fellow listeners. It’s a welcoming way to ease into unfamiliar classical music, meet people, learn something new, and hear how much more a piece can reveal once you know what to listen for.
Explore the Discovery Series →Solo Piano Spotlight
Spend your Sunday afternoon with some of the greatest piano music ever written, played by exceptional pianists from Chicago and beyond on The CheckOut’s Yamaha concert grand.
Solo Piano Spotlight brings you up close to extraordinary pianists in our intimate 60-seat space—with mimosas, great music, and no bad seat in the house. From contemporary music to overlooked gems and masterpieces of the repertoire, every program is different and chosen by the pianist.
A world-class pianist. A concert grand. A mimosa. In a former 7-Eleven.
Not a bad way to spend a Sunday afternoon.
Explore Solo Piano Spotlight →Cello Resonance
Eight cellos. Eight musicians spaced throughout The CheckOut. One room completely surrounded by sound.
Cello Resonance transforms The CheckOut into an immersive sonic environment, with the audience seated inside an ensemble of eight cellists. Music moves around the room, surrounds you, and lets you experience the extraordinary depth and resonance of the cello from the inside out.
The program moves from Arvo Pärt’s haunting Fratres and Kaija Saariaho’s Neiges to Seth Boustead’s Ecstatic Fury, Sofia Gubaidulina’s Mirage: The Dancing Sun, and Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas No. 5.
Eight cellos. Sixty seats. One night only.
Explore Cello Resonance →Graceland Portraits
Just across the street from The CheckOut lies one of Chicago’s most extraordinary collections of stories.
Graceland Portraits is a new commissioning project created in partnership with historic Graceland Cemetery. Five American composers each choose a notable Chicagoan buried at Graceland and create a new work inspired by their life, work, and legacy.
Together, the pieces become musical portraits of the people who helped shape Chicago—and a new way of encountering the history of the city through music.
The five newly commissioned works receive their world premieres at The CheckOut, fittingly located directly across the street from Graceland.
Five Chicago lives. Five composers. Five new musical portraits.
Explore Graceland Portraits →