I don’t see any reason why a woman could or should not wear a veil, or a hat, while in the choir or acting as a cantor, provided one used the same common sense criteria as with any other article of clothing or apparel. If for example your skirt was so extremely short that it distracted others --not with lust, but with its simply being so short that it ‘stood out’–you shouldn’t wear it. However, those things rest on the order of the fact that the ‘too short’ distracts the eye because it is not modest, not just because it is different.
That’s the thing. A woman going up wearing ankle length skirt or even pants, and a long sleeve top, while all the other women were wearing short dresses, would look ‘different’ just as much as one woman wearing a short dress would look different if standing among all the other women if they wore long pants/long sleeves, right? But people wouldn’t feel the same kind of visceral discomfort. Even if they thought virtue-shaming, "Why is that woman wearing such an obvious ‘virtuous’ outfit, she must be holier than thou, she’s making everybody uncomfortable’, those are all based on a perception that looking ‘modest’ is not just a fake claim, but a malicious stab at others.
But a woman wearing a really too short or otherwise inappropriate outfit --and this goes for men too–might do so out of simple ignorance, but even if one is charitable, saying, "at least they’re here’ or ‘that might be all they have’, one knows that the outfit itself is inappropriate, and one is distracted by it because of its being inappropriate. . .
as opposed to being ‘distracted’ by an appropriate attire when one is distracted not by the appropriateness but by one’s internalized judgment and condemnation of the wearer for simply, in the viewer’s MIND, not in FACT, appearing to ‘condemn’ others in some way. And this is often, very often, the mindset of those who criticize a woman for wearing a headcovering. It is not the problem of the woman who wears the covering.
Now one doesn’t live in a vacuum. it is entirely possible that your priest, for whatever reason, or your fellow choir members, might feel this kind of ‘condemnation’ toward an item of dress they feel is ‘virtue shaming’. They would be wrong of course (a veil is an inanimate object just as are short shorts), and often wrong in attempting to ‘read the heart’ of others based on their own feelings, but one needs to consider others too.
So if Father says, “would you eschew the veil” or your fellow choir members say to you, ’ We don’t HAVE to wear these any more" (the implication being, “we don’t want anybody to wear them”, you could while in the choir choose not to wear the veil. Sometimes people just ‘aren’t ready’ to perceive something that for whatever reason they’ve been conditioned to view in a bad way as being good, or even neutral. Not yet. So drop back a bit, perhaps, so that they can associate somebody who was wearing a veil as NOT being ‘militant’, as being somebody who ‘listened to them’, who ‘respected them’. . .and see if as they become comfortable with you the person they might become comfortable with how you are devoted to God.
