Cage, John

US composer. His interest in Indian classical music led him to the view that the purpose of new music was to change the way people listen. From 1948 he experimented with instruments, graphics, and methods of random selection in an effort to generate a music of pure incident. For example, he used a number of radios, tuned to random stations, in Imaginary Landscape IV (1951). His ideas greatly influenced late 20th-century aesthetics.

Cage studied briefly with Arnold Schoenberg, also with Henry Cowell, and joined others in reacting against the European music tradition in favour of a freer style open to non-Western attitudes. Working in films during the 1930s, Cage assembled and toured a percussion orchestra using ethnic instruments and noisemakers, for which Double Music (1941) was composed (with Lou Harrison). He invented the prepared piano, in which different objects are inserted between the strings, altering the tone and the sound produced, to tour as accompanist with the dancer Merce Cunningham, a lifelong collaborator.