Somei Satoh was born in 1947, Japan.
Somei Satoh has emerged as one of Japan's most internationally acclaimed and important composers of the post-Takemitsu era. He arrived at music not through the usual technical studies of harmony, counter point and orchestration, but rather as an outgrowth of the spiritual exercises of Shintoism and Zen Buddhism. To Shintoism he owes the sense of simplicity and essential purity that pervades his creations; by Zen Buddhism he was inspired to capture a sense of the infinite, the transcendent, the timelessly static.
In the early 1970s, following studies at the Nihon University of Art, Satoh became involved in music as a member of the Tone Field performance group, an inter-arts ensemble that provided a forum for his earliest efforts in composition. Initially, he limited his compositions to piano pieces, or to works for piano with electronics, exploring gradations of sound by employing tremolos of single tones or clusters using the instrument's various registers or dynamics. Many of the techniques he used were also being explored by the Minimalists who were just then emerging in New York City's downtown art galleries. Although Satoh had arrived at his sound through a different process, born of purely Japanese inspiration(as opposed to the more generalized, pan Asian roots of the American Minimalists), the resulting pieces found a ready audience in America, and Satoh spent the year 1983-84 in the United States In 1980, he was awarded the Japan Art Festival Prize. In fact, his music has always retained an identifiable "Japaneseness" that Americans are likely to consider mystical; on occasion, his music has been described by critics in Japan as gendai hogaku, that is ,"contemporary traditional music". He composed "Kisetu" in 1999 on commission from the New York Philharmonic.
(by James M. Keller, Program Editor of the New York Philharmonic)