[scrame]

It is for sure pretentious, he's a cloistered academic classic music nerd that appreciates art exclusively through rigid structure. He's also aware of that and tries to explore that.

The second half is weird too, because it describes the academic work he does in the future, but is a stab in the dark compared to the documentarian aspect of the first half.

Think of it like forming a hypothesis:

GEB: This is what we can see.

EGB: This is what I think it means.