Somei Satoh was born on January 19, 1947, in Sendai (northern Honsu), Japan, and currently lives in Tokyo.  Essentially an autodidact in music, Somei Satoh has emerged as one of Japan's most internationally acclaimed composers of the post-Takemitsu era. He arrived at musical composition through 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.

Following studies at the Nihon University of Art in early 1970's, Satoh became involved in music as a member of the Tone Field performance group, an inter-arts ensemble which performed his earliest composition. His first works were composed for solo piano or for piano with electronics, exploring gradations of sound by employing tremolos of single tones or clusters using the instrument's various registers of dynamics. Many of the techniques he used at that time were also being explored by the Minimalists who were just then emerging in New York City.

Like the American Minimalists, Satoh's style took on greater complexity as the years passed. In the course of the 1970's, his instrumentation became more varied with greater sense of melody. By the late 1980's, his works were displaying an almost Romantic sensuality. Presently, Satoh employs forces on a large orchestral scale, as in Kisetsu, a work commissioned by the New York Philharmonic in 1999.