It has often been observed that plainsong played a decisive role in Duruflé's formation and in his compositions, but it has not been pointed out that Duruflé actually played a role in its revival. While the centrality of plainsong emerged in his very first opus number, the unpublished Fantaisie sur des thèmes grégoriens (1927) for piano, and even earlier in a student work based on a Gregorian Credo (1926), plainsong was, for him, much more than one musical element among the many available to him. It was, rather, so much the pith of his existence that he raised the church's plainsong to an exalted place in the secular harmonies of modern French music, advancing the plainsong revival to its ultimate stage. Duruflé was not only a composer, in other words, but a reformer.

The church's effort to rid itself of banal secular influences and reappropriate the music proper to its worship began deep in the early years of the nineteenth century, and even earlier. After the French Revolution the musical practice of the church found itself in dire straits, and reformers took years to locate, research, revive, and experiment with the practice of plainsong so that it could effectively counter the republican tunes, the secular airs, and the trivial pomp that had become so popular in its wake. All of this was, in Duruflé's view, a “true revolution.”

In the earliest decades of the revival, plainsong represented the church's alternative to the more popular forms of music that had entered worship after the Revolution. In most instances plainsong was an intrusion, an unwanted change in the familiar and the acceptable, and took upon itself the air of sacrality that put it in stark contrast with the more secular fare of the usual Sunday morning. It was perhaps no accident that this development took place in the same years that secularism and anticlericalism were rampant across France. Plainsong thus represented a church that was at defiant odds with the state.