(1912-1992) US composer. His interest in Indian classical music led him to the view that the purpose of 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 24 radios, tuned to random stations, in Imaginary Landscape No 4 1951. His ideas profoundly influenced late 20th-century esthetics.
Cage studied briefly with Arnold Schoenberg, also with Henry Cowell, and joined others in reacting against the European music tradition in favor of a freer idiom open to non-Western attitudes. Working in films during the 1930s, Cage assembled and toured a percussion orchestra incorporating ethnic instruments and noisemakers, for which Double Music 1941 was composed (with Lou Harrison). He invented the prepared piano to tour as accompanist with the dancer Merce Cunningham, a lifelong collaborator. In a later work, 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds 1952, the pianist sits at the piano reading a score for that length of time but does not play.
Cage’s essays and writings were collected in, for example, Silence 1961 and For the Birds 1981.

ETYM French cage, from Latin cavea cavity, cage, from cavus hollow. Related to Cave, Cajole, Gabion.
1. Made or wire or metal bars in which birds or animals are kept; SYN. coop.
2. Something that restricts freedom as a cage restricts movement.

The goal in ice hockey.

To confine in a cage; SYN. cage in.