The material's associations with precision instruments, and with applications both clinical and sinister, also matter greatly.
From Louis Andriessen's Tapdance, which requires me to imitate charleston tap shoes, to Harrison Birtwistle's sinister and spiky The Axe Manual, which piles up layers of instruments, tuned and untuned.
Once the dance shifted from its lighter beginning, the instrument's presence became more oppressive, and other sinister ideas filtered in.
Other instruments — an unwound French horn, a sliced Stradivarius — look more sinister, as if they had been plucked from paintings by Hieronymus Bosch.
President Vladimir Putin played that scandal as a joke, even though he also used it to link non-governmental organisations with foreign spies.This time the instruments are more primitive, the message more overt and the implications more sinister.
The word soon gained a sinister connotation: Scavenger's Daughter was an iron hoop used as an instrument of torture in the Tower of London during the reign of Henry VIII, a corruption of the name of the chief torturer, Skevington.
It was almost sinister in its power, and I was forever ruined to serious dedication to any other instrument".
