Orchestras of Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs) enable new musical collaboration possibilities, extending those of acoustic and electric orchestras. However the creation and development of these orchestras remain constrained. In fact, each new musical collaboration system or orchestra piece relies on a fixed number of musicians, a fixed set of instruments (often only one) and a fixed subset of possible modes of collaboration. In this paper, we describe a unified framework that enables the design of digital orchestras with potentially different DMIs and an expandable set of collaboration modes. It relies on research done on analysis and classification of traditional and digital orchestras, on research in Collaborative Virtual Environments, and on interviews of musicians and composers. Using and extending this framework will facilitate the exploration of musical collaboration possibilities.