Paul Lansky often uses his computer music wizardry to create vivid sonic caricatures. In The Lesson, for example, Lansky takes recorded snippets of a conversation with an old professor and submerges them in their own resonance until only the skeletal contours of the speech can be discerned; in Night Traffic, he applies similar methods to the sounds of a four-lane highway. In Guy's Harp, however, the caricature is of an actual musical instrument, the harmonica, as performed by blues virtuoso Guy DeRosa.

The generative element in this work is a recording of DeRosa improvising alone; Lansky uses this initial material to extrapolate a variety of textures and timbres. "The harmonica is abstracted from its normal associations and placed in a context where the entire universe is culled from harmonica sounds," the composer explains. "Big harmonicas, small harmonicas...even a meta-harmonica in which the resonance of a space is tuned to the teeth of [DeRosa's] harmonica." Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of this work is the seamlessness with which an apparently undoctored harmonica sound gradually melts into the background or transforms into some strange instantiation of itself. Lansky frequently takes a figure or gesture and loops it quietly in the background, panning it back and forth between the left and right channels of the stereophonic spectrum to give the overall soundscape a kind of undulating, surreal quality. Occasionally, the same material will be present at several layers and in several different guises within the texture, rendered simultaneously as a loosely reverberating background loop and a foreground solo figure. Through the use of digital filtering Lansky is able also to map the timbre of the harmonica onto the articulatory contour of an upright bass, which provides a twangy and percussive foundation throughout the piece. He likewise utilizes controlled resonance parameters to create startling special effects,—as in the passage near the end of the piece where multiple layers of compounded echoes and reverberations suddenly project sounds ranging from string tremolos to train whistles. These finally dissipate to reveal the lone, unadorned harmonica in its natural state, improvising its way to the piece's close.

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