Starting From the End is the process I use to learn most pieces that are either relatively long or somewhat difficult.  I have found that for myself, if I start at the beginning of a piece of music it seems as if it gets progressively more difficult as I get further and further into the piece and the ending may be very weak - or I might give up and never get to the end.  I adopted this approach in 2015 when I was suffering from a mild curiosity about minor keys and randomly selected B minor as the specimen I wanted to study.  I pulled out my copy of Bach's Well Tempered Clavier book one and looked for the B minor fugue.  Other than the C minor fugue that I had learned in the mid 1980's I had never learned another fugue and figured it would be as good as any to work on.  Besides, the tempo marking was Largo so it couldn't be that bad, could it?

At the time I had, and still have, a great fascination for the music of Bach, but I also wanted to learn cadence patterns.  So what better place to start than with the final cadence.  So this was a minor final cadence? (with a picardy 3rd).  The sustained tones and finger crossing in the final three measures were particularly torturous for me at the time but I was determined so I decided I would start from the back of the piece and work my way forward... at a rate of six measures per week.  That meant that it should only take me about 13 weeks to learn the entire piece and since I was starting from the end it would only get better as I got closer to the end since that was where I started learning it from.

What's amazing to me is that it worked for me for the most part.  It actually took me longer than three months to get it all memorized but I eventually did with a few places that were not completely secure.  The sad thing about it was that I was mostly sick of the piece after working on it for five months that I have let it go.  Still, I found the technique to be an effective way for learning reasonably difficult pieces and and now use it when learning almost all the pieces I want to learn to play with the written music.