Duruflé began his career as a touring recitalist at a fairly young age. Among the earliest signs that his career had promise were the recitals he presented in 1923, when he was twenty-one years old, at the cathedral of Saint Pierre in Lisieux, at the college of Saint François de Sales in Évreux (1925), at Notre-Dame in Orbec (1928), and at Saint Taurin in Évreux (1929). In the ensuing years he developed a wide range of professional relationships with his colleagues and with performing organizations in Paris.

On April 20, 1928 he played what can probably be counted his Paris debut recital, at the Institut des jeunes aveugles, in a series of four recitals sponsored between February and May of that year by Les Amis de l’Orgue. Though billed as a private performance for the association, the recital was reviewed in the press. His program featured the premieres of the Molto adagio from Suite No. 35 of Tournemire's L’Orgue mystique and the Paraphrase from the third Suite. The review appeared in Le Courrier musical et théâtral: “M. Maurice Duruflé proved himself a brilliant and sensitive performer of Frescobaldi, Grigny, J. S. Bach, Franck, Vierne, and Tournemire. He demonstrated the benefits that a strong school education can confer in broadening one's innate gifts of taste and feeling.”

His touring assumed a more ambitious scale in 1931, when he toured the south of France, performing on March 3 at the cathedral in Monaco, on March 4 at the cathedral in Nice, and, on March 6 at Sacré-Coeur in Menton. In Nice, and probably in the two other cities as well, he played the Prélude, adagio et choral varié sur le Veni Creator. It was surely through Duruflé's friendship with Louis Vierne and Madeleine Richepin that this brief tour was arranged. Richepin's mother had a villa near Menton, on the French Riviera, and Vierne vacationed there.

Among Duruflé's many professional associations, the earliest (apart from Les Amis de l’Orgue) was with the Société nationale de musique, founded in 1871 by Camille Saint-Saëns and Romain Bussine, whose aim was to promote French music. Dubbed “the cradle of the magnificent renewal of our French music,” the society routinely extended calls for scores from the composers among its membership, of works that had not already been performed publicly.