In the 2015 Art Institute of Chicago exhibition, Ireland: Crossroads of Art and Design (1690-1840), glassware, paintings, books, furniture, and musical instruments – over two-hundred objects celebrating Anglo-Ireland’s art and craft heritage – were put on display for three months from March 17th. For the first time it its history, the Art Institute commissioned a music CD to help recontextualise these different artifacts now being presented collectively, also for the first time, outside of their original ‘big house’ environments. This paper explores the process by which the CD was imagined and produced by a predominantly Chicago-based team that chose to include both illustrative, ‘authentic’ period music and newly composed ‘interpretative’ music in order to create a sonic environment that would “serve as an accompaniment to this historic exhibition… (amplifying) its mission and message” (Monkhouse 2015). I contend that this period of Anglo-Irish history is sonically negotiated and represented on the CD by very specific compositions of Irish traditional music that both strive to (re)create an eighteenth-century soundscape, as well as fashion a receptive environment for contemporary, Chicago-based audiences largely unfamiliar with this period but not with Irish music more broadly. To what extent the CD may have been ‘required’ to mediate any surviving Irish-American nationalist inclinations, or may indeed be a product of such tendancies, is also explored. The CD is therefore placed within the broader context of Chicago’s long history of publicly staging Ireland and Irish music/culture, while interviews with the CD’s curators/performers reveal the challenges and opportunities presented by its commissioning.