Former ISMTA Certification Chairman and member of ISMTA for eighteen years, Anita Whalen traces her life’s experiences in music culminating in a career in orchestra management. In her memoir, Mozart Blooms in Woodstock, the Illinois Festival That Could!, she shares information about the turn-around of the Woodstock Mozart Festival from the brink of closure to the heights of artistic achievement. Included are vignettes of famous and not-yet famous artists on the rise, descriptions of colorful personalities and occurrences, unlikely opportunities, challenges, successes, and other details of what goes on behind the scenes of a performance series.