by the Melos Chorus, technical-scientific committee
The répétiteur Ralph Lyford at the Boston Opera, early twentieth century. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
The tailcoat, tails and a white bow tie, was never musicians’ dress: it was the evening dress of every European gentleman between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When an orchestra of 1890 walked onto the stage dressed that way, it was simply dressed like its audience, or one notch below: the tailcoat was also the uniform of the waiters and butlers of the houses where musicians went to serve up music. Then the world changed its clothes and the orchestra did not: the audience moved to the dinner jacket, then the jacket, then the sweatshirt, and the stage stayed frozen in the wardrobe of a hundred and thirty years ago. Today the tailcoat is a relic that survives in only two habitats: symphony concerts and diplomatic balls.
We know the defences of the relic, and not all of them are wrong. Visual uniformity serves the music: eighty people dressed alike vanish as individuals and become a single instrument, and black does not distract from the one thing that matters. Solemnity signals that something special is happening, and rituals, we wrote about this in connection with applause, are not all to be thrown out. And there is the players’ practical argument: the tailcoat is a tried and tested work suit, the right pockets, freedom of the arms, no decision to make at seven in the evening. But the counterarguments weigh more. The garment that in 1890 said we are like you today says we are from another century, and for new audiences it is the first keep-out sign they meet, before the music itself; for women, who joined orchestras when the uniform was already a fossil, the code was for decades a muddle of rules written by men. It is no accident that the youngest orchestras in the world, and many of the major ones on non-gala evenings, are sliding towards plain black: the same uniformity, a century less.
The magazine’s position is undogmatic and runs in two directions. First: the problem is not the tailcoat, it is the autopilot. An orchestra that chooses the tailcoat for a Missa solemnis makes a legitimate theatrical gesture; one that wears it out of inertia for a hundred and thirty years is communicating, without meaning to, that nothing in that hall has changed and nothing will, and the box office registers that message. Second: dress is dramaturgy, and dramaturgy is decided. The same orchestra can wear the rite on gala night and a black sweater on the night it plays until dawn: that is not inconsistency, it is staging. The day the dress goes back to being a choice for each evening, instead of a fossil for all of them, the tailcoat will stop being a problem and go back to being what it was in 1890: the right clothes for that evening. In the meantime, if you see an orchestra in tails, know that you are looking at the greatest free-admission costume museum in Europe. Your ticket pays for the music.