David Anavitarte, a conductor, singer, and pianist, is music director and conductor of the Brazos Chamber Orchestra and the Healing Heart vocal ensemble and maintains a private voice and piano studio in the Keene, Texas, area. He also serves as Associate Director of Music Ministries at the First United Methodist Church in Burleson, Texas. He and his wife, Katherine (Baker), also a singer, tour nationally.

Anavitarte was director of choral activities for eighteen years, 1991 to 2009, at Southwestern Adventist University and served as chair of the music department from 2001 to 2009. Prior to coming to SWAU, he taught music at Adelphian and San Diego academies. In addition to his primary identity as chair and conductor while at SWAU, Anavitarte was also a singer who accompanied himself in an improvisational style.

A dynamic and charismatic person, he inspires his students to achieve at a high level. In each of the schools where he has taught, he has developed a flourishing choral program that presents an eclectic mix of both serious traditional and contemporary sacred choral music.

Six years after he arrived at Southwestern Adventist College, now University, Anavitarte formed the University Singers, a select group of 20 to 30 students, and Asaph, a male chorus of 16, to complement the larger 100-member traditional choir, Mizpah Choraliers. In both of the mixed choirs he has presented masterpieces in choral literature such as the Elijah, the Mozart and Rutter Requiems, and others.

He also formed the Brazos Chamber Orchestra in 1997, an independent professional ensemble of 45 to 50 that, in addition to accompanying choirs in giving major choral works, gives two to three concerts annually featuring a wide variety of music, from symphonic literature to Broadway musicals.

In his eight years of leadership in music at the university, he successfully took the department through uncertain times, weathering difficulties arising from university leadership that failed to see the value of supporting a music degree program. Beginning in 2006 with the appointment of a totally supportive president, Anavitarte was able to rebuild a music department that offered a comprehensive music education program with depth and qualified specialists as teachers.

Anavitarte began study on piano at age seven. His mother, who had taken voice lessons from a member of the Philadelphia Opera chorus, loved music and would take her son at age seven and eight to dress rehearsals of the opera at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. He remembers spending a lot of time at the AOM as a child.

He attended Blue Mountain Academy in his junior and senior years, studying voice with and singing in the school's choirs under Larry Karpenko. While attending BMA, he roomed with noted choral conductor Paul Hill's son, Roger. Through this relationship he became acquainted with the Hill family and during academy breaks would travel with Roger to Washington, D.C., where they would sing under Paul's direction, an opportunity recalled by Anavitarte as a totally inspiring experience.

He attended Columbia Union College in Washington, where he continued voice study with Larry Otto, Jon Gilbertson, and Robert Young. He also studied piano with Neil Tilkens, living with the Tilkens family during three of his five years at CUC. Following graduation from CUC with a B.S. in music education in 1982, Anavitarte accepted a position at Adelphian Academy in Michigan, where he taught until 1986.

He continued study at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, completing a master's degree in choral conducting in 1989. That fall he began teaching at San Diego Academy in California, where he worked until he became director of the choral program at SWAC two years later. In his time at the university, he completed all classwork for a doctorate in music at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Anavitarte studied conducting with Jon Robertson, Ray Robinson, Daryl One, and Paul Salamunovich. He has studied with Salamunovich for several years and continues to do so, regarding him as the teacher who has had the greatest influence on his career.

The Anivitartes have two children, Donielle, who is an emergency room nurse and is married to William Halvorsen, and Devin, who is working on his M.DIV. at Andrews University.

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