These last few years, your star has taken a meteoric rise. What’s different now that you are, as Anne Midgette put it, an “it” girl?

[Laughs] She also called me a sacred cow, which was pretty funny.

I’m really happy. All of my dreams are coming true in a way. It’s still incredibly hard, but it’s hard in different ways. I still feel the stress of money, and more even than that, I feel the stress of time. It’s like birthing these things into existence. I still have to take care of them and make sure that they’re being taken care of. A huge amount of my time is spent managing projects I’ve already completed. So I don’t have… I’m struggling to find the balance of creative work with like business work, just managing these massive things.

I’m happy that I’m in position where I’m secure enough that I can give back. I’ve started this organization called Luna Lab, which is a nonprofit for female composers. It feels really good to be able to have the energy and the wherewithal to do that.

I can’t talk to any woman right now and not ask the obvious: What has your experience been in your profession as a woman?

So much of what women experience in other fields translates to what I experience in classical music. I find the whole #MeToo movement very empowering. Reading something like Lean In a couple years ago also really clarified things for me. I was like, oh, that’s exactly what I experience.

I feel like we’re making progress, but it’s still too slow in my opinion. Way too slow. I’m shocked that we’re still at this place. I thought when I started my undergrad that by the time I got to be 37 years old, things would have dramatically changed. I just assumed that that would have happened. And it didn’t. So now I think that maybe there’s a potential for the change that I’ve wanted for the last 17 years.

I also feel pissed off that I had to wait until I was 37 to really feel like I had agency, that I was able to say something about what’s going on. I think that the numbers, the statistics of women in classical music… those alone, apart from any salacious horrible story of abuse or harassment, just the statistics alone are cause for a revolution. They’re horrible. They’re absolutely horrible. People are always asking me, oh, what have you experienced? What horrible things have happened to you? And I’m like, the statistics are the horrible thing. You look at the fact that the Met has only performed two works by a woman—that is horrible for me. That’s a terrible thing to grow up under, trying to make a career in opera. It makes me mad every day that they don’t do anything about it.

I think these stories need to come out, and they’re a great first step, but there still has to be major shifts in the culture. I see the same things over and over again. I see men getting opportunities based on their potential, yet women have to prove themselves ten times to be given one small opportunity. That is a real obstacle for women in opera. That’s changing slowly but again not fast enough.

The big orchestras and opera companies seem to have been saying for years, we’re just trying to figure out how to stay in business; we really can’t deal with these gender parity issues right now. But out where you are on the alternative end of classical music, we see much more equitable representation. And we also often find out there music that feels more relevant. What is it about classical music outside the mainstream that makes it so much more in step with now?

You’re not beholden to a massive institution that has a board. And I think a lot of these institutions have a misunderstanding of what it means to take a risk. You’re right: On the one hand, they grumble about going out of business. And then they describe the hiring of women and people of color as a risk. I’m just so offended by that kind of language. And the reality is the opposite. I’ve sold out every opera I’ve ever put on the stage. Every night. How am I a risk? Even if you only care about money and numbers, then I am the safest thing for you to put on your stage. The reality of what audiences want is… I think these institutions have a misunderstanding. They think people want the same thing over and over, when actually even younger audiences, which is like the golden… cow [laughs] of what everyone’s trying to attract, they want to see themselves reflected in the creators. They want diversity onstage.

It’s a weird thing to look at women I admire, like Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson. These are women who have radically different, unconventional paths. And I can see totally why they did that. Why would you try to normalize yourself in a world that doesn’t want you? And then on the back end, people like Meredith Monk are not described as composers. They’re like, oh well she’s something else. You know? But no, she’s actually a brilliant composer who deserves to be right up there with Philip Glass and John Adams as the forerunner of minimalism. It’s kind of this endless cycle of being outside of the cycle.

At some point, the market has got to speak. Right? The big old institutions have got to understand that their contemporary audiences want to see and hear equality. As these conversations have shifted and as your own reputation has expanded, have you begun getting calls from any unexpected places?

Not as many as people seem to think. Everyone’s like, oh, your phone must be ringing off the hook. I’m like, not really. We’re slow. It’s a slow world. It’s not like you have one good review and then all of a sudden you have ten thousand commissions. But… I have been surprised. I’ve received some calls from European institutions. Especially as an American, especially as an American woman, I was like, I will never work in those places. But there’s a shift there too, both stylistically and in that they’re becoming more open and in terms of diversity of gender. So we’ll see. We’ll see how it all pans out.

The Washington National Opera will present Proving Up at the Terrace Theater, Kennedy Center, on Jan. 19 at 7:30pm and Jan. 21 at 2pm; kennedy-center.org

Samantha London, who holds two degrees in piano performance, is a Baltimore-based arts journalist. She received the Audience Award at the inaugural Rubin Institute for Music Criticism in 2012. Her work has been published by Atlas Obscura, CSO Sounds & Stories, and Oxford University Press.