UPDATE: THIS CONCERT HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO ILLNESS.

We are so sorry we had to cancel this performance due to illness! Because it's part of ACM's festival to open "The CheckOut," it won't be able to be rescheduled. Please contact ACM for more details and be sure to check out the rest of the festival!

-KQ 9/22/25

Access Contemporary Music is celebrating the completion of its radical transformation of a long-empty former 7-Eleven into The CheckOut, Chicago’s newest chamber music venue with an ambitious festival.

The opening festival features a dozen new pieces commissioned by ACM plus performances by some of Chicago’s most acclaimed chamber music groups.

Details: Chicago’s Kontras Quartet brings fierce clarity and emotional depth to Sacred Traces — a program inspired by the sacred, the stirring, and the deeply personal.

John Elmquist’s Sacred Traces sets the tone with dense textures and a sense of spiritual unrest. Julia Wolfe’s Four Marys merges folk balladry with minimalist punch, while Terry Riley’s G Song shimmers with hypnotic ease. Daniel Bernard Roumain’s String Quartet No. 5: Parks pays tribute to Rosa Parks with searing tenderness, and Armenian folk melodies — collected by composer-priest Komitas and arranged by Sergei Aslamazyan — close the evening in haunting reflection.