Today is the birthday of French composer Claude Debussy, born in 1862.  I imagine more than a few blank stares and shrugged shoulders in response to this piece of trivial information, but I find the event worth commemorating. The music Debussy left behind demonstrates that what a person does in life reverberates. The effects of our actions may heave a mountain-sized tsunami, but be assured that what we do matters even if they only amount to a ripple.

As a boy growing up in Paris, seven-year-old Claude began taking piano lessons, and within three years, he enrolled in the Paris Conservatoire. His experimental methods vexed his instructors, but he persisted in breaking established rules of composition and in setting a precedent for new ones. He found inspiration from visual art, literature and poetry; and he was sometimes influenced by the work of other composers, but his work was all his own.

The results of Debussy’s stubborn approach to composition is a catalog of music for orchestra, ballet, opera, vocalists and a list of solo piano pieces as long as your arm. It is performed around the world and studied at every level of musicianship. A crater on Mercury and an asteroid belt have been named after the composer, and admirers still leave flowers on his grave.

But on a more personal level, I celebrate Claude Debussy on his birthday because of what his music has meant to me since my childhood. When I was in my early teen years, my mother bought a seven-record set of classical piano music, and I would camp out by our massive console stereo as big as a couch and listen to the albums, stacked up on the turntable one after the other.

It was here that I first discovered Debussy, and it was here that I learned that melodies and chords could be time stopping and hypnotic. With no regard for my abilities, I wrote down all the pieces I wanted to learn to play—“Claire de Lune,” “Reverie,” “Maid with the Flaxen Hair,” a too-difficult arabesque.

I marched into my piano lesson with poor Mr. Stevesand, waved my list in his face and said, “Teach me these! Teach me these! Yes, I promise to work on those exercises that give me hives, but teach me these!” My teacher conceded, and soon my admiration for the music on my worn-out albums developed into a pure love for what I could create with my own hands on the keys of a piano.

In those days, one of my favorites pieces was “La Cathedrale Engloutie,” or “The Sunken Cathedral,” based on the ancient folktale of the Island of Ys. The reigning king had a daughter, Dahut, who ran wild on the place and lived a life of debauchery until a knight appeared to exact judgment. As a storm washed over the island, he tricked the princess into unlocking the floodgates, and as the sea claimed Ys, the king was forced to sacrifice his daughter in order to save himself.

They say that on a clear morning, the Ys cathedral will rise up from the sea, and one can hear chiming bells and chanting priests from across the water. But then the resurrected cathedral returns to the depths, and the sounds fade.

In “The Sunken Cathedral,” you can hear every aspect of this story, and more than 30 years later, I still enjoy playing it, pounding out those dripping chimes as if I were the sacrifice. And then I take a crack at the other tattered sheets of Debussy music I have been lugging around since high school, each one a tool of self-expression and a medium for sheer joy, just as they were years ago.

With all of Debussy’s international success and celebrated legacy, it would be fair to say he did not set out to create music solely to amuse and console a hobbyist piano player sitting at her piano in the middle of Ohio nearly 100 years after his death. But if I could speak to him today, I would say this—do not discount the value of improving the quality of a solitary life, one whose applause you will never hear. Even a single action reverberates, and even a small contribution matters.