Roger Scruton finds Boulez's preoccupation with timbre and sonority in the instrumental writing has the effect of preventing "simultaneities from coalescing as chords" . As a result, Scruton says that, especially where pitches are concerned, "Le Marteau" "contains no recognizable material – no units of significance that can live outside the work that produces them" . Scruton also feels that the involved overlapping metres notated in the score beg "a real question as to whether we hear the result as a rhythm at all" . Richard Taruskin found "Le Marteau exemplified the lack of concern on the part of modernist composers for the comprehensibility of their music" . Equally bluntly, Christopher Small, writing in 1987 said “It is not possible to invoke any ‘inevitable time lag’ which is supposed to be required for the assimilation of ...such critically acclaimed works as... "Le marteau sans maître"... Those who champion 'the new music' await its assimilation into the repertory much as the early Christians awaited the Second Coming" .