Writes Sanborn, "The basis of this project was to ask composers to address war and peace—that interpretation frames each work. Composer Jerome Kitzke chose two poets, Walt Whitman and Rumi, to voice 'There is a Field,' making me ask, 'How does an artist interpret such moral themes?' Whitman's inspiration, if that's the word, was the American Civil War—and the results of violence he witnessed as a wound-dresser. His beatific verse brings the horror of war into a quiet clarity, while the photography of Mathew Brady turns that dread into models for reportage and naive photographic compositions captured on the battlefields."