Orchestra 101: Dress Code
At the end of the previous article in this series I referred to concert attire. Suffice to say it is specified very clearly in the Master Agreement what to wear for every type of service.
The short version for students about to play professional jobs for the first time is to dress well and somewhat conservatively. Ask the Personnel Manager what you can wear and don’t push the limits of it.
Some players will push the edges of any policy and it overall is not a good idea. Some donors are in particular really hung up on how the orchestra looks. On horn we kind of lay 
low in the back so we are a bit lucky on this. String players really have to be right in line with the guidelines specified and hammered out in years of negotiations. Don’t give a contractor an easy reason to not hire you again, dress the part.
Speaking of dressing the part, I found this interesting but somewhat unrelated item in a most interesting blog, Dial M for Musicology. One of the authors on the site Phil Ford had a day where he had to come in and teach in street clothes due illnesses in the family. He relates this story,
At one point I had to talk to Peter Burkholder about some department matter and apologized for dressing in a manner unbecoming to a musicologist. He told me that an old professor of his dressed in the coat-and-tie professorial style, but sometimes changed it up with Western wear. Students puzzled over this incongruity and had managed to assimilate it to their collective perceptual framework when the professor changed it up on them again and wore a suit and tie with cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat.
To conclude this article I have one final tip for aspiring male orchestral players reading this out there. Periodically large tux shops have sales of old rentals that for our purposes as orchestral players are great deals, especially for horn players a bit to the back of the scene most of the time. I bought my current tux coat at this type of sale back in Nashville and it still looks great. If you don’t have a proper tux coat get to shopping, there are always deals out there for them if you call around.
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